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Promise Rover to the Moon, Webb's White Dwarf Atmosphere & Euclid's 60M Stars
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
NASA is eyeing its Mars testbed rover Promise for a lunar south pole mission — and James Webb has detected the first detailed atmosphere around a planet orbiting a dead star. Six stories from the last 24 hours in space and astronomy.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
NASA is seriously considering sending a Mars rover to the Moon. Not a new one built for the job.
Part of what's driving this is timing. The lunar south pole is where water ice is thought to exist in permanently shadowed craters, making it the highest-value real estate on the Moon for any sustained human presence.
Shift to something that reshapes how we think about planetary fate. The James Webb Space Telescope has detected the first detailed atmosphere around a planet orbiting a white dwarf.
ESA's Euclid space telescope has released the largest visible-light image ever captured of the Milky Way's galactic center. Sixty-plus million stars in a single mosaic, assembled over twenty-six hours of observation.
On the telescope coordination front, NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory marked the US two hundred and fiftieth anniversary by releasing four composite images combining X-ray data with Hubble and Webb observations. Galaxy clusters, nebulae, supernova remnants, rendered in red, white, and blue.
The two things worth tracking closely from here: whether NASA formally approves the Promise lunar mission, and whether Webb's atmospheric data on WD 1856 b produces a confirmed heating mechanism. Both are unresolved.
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