Image credit: Photo by Dan Bartlett/APOTY25 The brilliant hues of Comet 12P/Pons–Brooks arise as sunlight and solar wind encounter ancient ice and dust. Across millions of kilometres, the universe reminds us that even solitary travellers are shaped by the fields through which they pass. (New Thinking Allowed)
By Chelsea Gohd
Published 2 days ago (Space.com)
“It’s in the habitable zone, which is super exciting for astrobiology and habitability and searching for life.”
This might be the closest we’ve gotten to finding a planet that could support life: Astronomers have detected an atmosphere around an Earth-like, rocky planet orbiting in the habitable zone around its star, a monumental first.
The rocky planet, called LHS 1140 b, is 48-light-years away from Earth and according to this new research, it has an atmosphere that contains helium. It is also the first rocky planet to have an atmosphere be detected directly. This is the first rocky planet to be found with an atmosphere that is also in the habitable zone, meaning it’s at the right distance away from its star for liquid water to potentially exist on the planet. As we continue to search the cosmos for planets that can be considered “habitable,” this planet checks more boxes than almost anything we’ve ever seen.
“We have actually detected directly the helium present in the atmosphere itself, and that’s the first direct detection for any rocky exoplanet, which is really exciting … and then there’s this added bonus that it’s in the habitable zone, which is super exciting for astrobiology and habitability and searching for life,” lead author Collin Cherubim, who recently earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University, told Space.com. “It feels kind of surreal.”
Watch full video here: Comet A3 photobombs sun observatory during powerful x-flare
Let’s explore this planet and the system where it “lives.”
This exoplanet, or planet outside of our solar system, was first discovered in 2017 by a team led by astronomer Jason Dittmann who is now a co-author on this new discovery.You may like
“This planet was found like 10 years ago, and we’re just now saying, okay, that’s an atmosphere,” Dittman told Space.com. “We’re slowly narrowing the gap and checking these boxes … we’re finding a planet that’s rocky, a planet that’s of the right temperature and now … it’s like okay, we finally found one that has an atmosphere.”
And being a rocky planet, “there’s definitely a surface … it’s made of rocks,” Dittman said. What does the planet’s surface look like? We can’t say yet, but the researchers who found this planet’s atmosphere think there’s a good chance it could have water.
While it orbits a red dwarf star, which is smaller and cooler than the sun, it orbits closer than we do to our star, maintaining a temperature that keeps the planet in the “Goldilocks zone” where liquid water could exist on its surface.
“It probably also has a lot of water,” Cherubim said. “If it has some amount of atmosphere that can provide a bit of a greenhouse effect, which we know that it does now … it will very likely be what we consider to be habitable conditions on Earth, and conditions that would likely support liquid water.”
So is it Earth-like? While it’s certainly not an Earth copy, this planet can be considered Earth-like in two main ways, Cherubim shared. One: its overall composition. The planet is rocky, likely with an iron core and (now we know) it has an atmosphere. And two: the planet’s temperature is just right for liquid water, which is necessary for life at least as far as we understand it on our planet.What to read next
The discovery of the first exoplanet was confirmed just over 30 years ago. Since then, scientists have found over 6,000 exoplanets and counting. And while a few rocky planets have been found in their star’s habitable zone, it wasn’t until now that an atmosphere has been confirmed around a rocky planet in the habitable zone.
One reason why scientists have had a hard time finding such planets with atmospheres is their stars. LHS 1140 b orbits the most common type of star, a red dwarf, which is about one-third the size of our sun. This type of star remains active for a lot longer than stars like our sun. This activity means it releases bursts of extreme radiation like solar flares and coronal mass ejections. And typically, the extreme radiation around these stars totally strips the atmospheres from the planets orbiting them, so astronomers have wondered if planets orbiting these stars can have an atmosphere at all.
“This discovery is a big deal because it’s showing that at least this rocky planet has retained an atmosphere over billions of years,” Cherubim said. It’s “a bona fide, robust way of saying yes, atmospheres can survive on rocky exoplanets.”
It’s possible that other gases beyond helium are in the planet’s atmosphere, and it’s possible that some of its atmosphere was previously stripped away by its star’s radiation. But the red dwarf that this planet orbits is roughly 6 billion years old, a few billion years older than the age at which their extreme radiation activity begins calming down. So while some helium is still slowly escaping the planet’s atmosphere over time, the team expects the planet to retain an atmosphere, Dittman shared. After all, even Earth’s helium is slowly escaping our own atmosphere.
To prove that this planet has an atmosphere, the team started with a prediction that Cherubim made during graduate school. It all started with a theoretical model and a sneaking suspicion that there must be rocky exoplanets with atmospheres other than Earth.
“This came out of a very specific prediction from a planetary evolution model that I actually developed myself, from scratch, from first principles, for my Ph.D. as a theorist, and I made a very specific prediction about this planet,” Cherubim said. “And then I went out and did a pretty unexpected, weird thing using this technique that’s typically reserved for observing giant planets, and I used it for a rocky planet, which nobody has done before.
“And lo and behold, I made this measurement that was actually consistent with my prediction. And it was really nice to kind of close the whole loop of the scientific method.”
The team took the theoretical model that Cherubim developed in graduate school and put it to the test using the Warm Infrared Echelle (WINERED) Spectrograph on the Magellan Observatory in Chile. And with their observations, they were able to see LHS 1140 b and another planet both transit, or pass in front of, their star in the same night. With this spectrographic data, they could identify the signatures of molecules in the atmospheres of these planets as they passed in front of the star. And while one planet yielded no results, this planet showed a direct, undeniable helium signature.
When looking at a planet that is rocky, has an atmosphere, and is in the habitable zone (meaning it could have liquid water), the question of life comes up quite quickly.
But the researchers don’t have enough data to make that conjecture. “I’m not claiming this planet has life,” Cherubim made clear. With further investigation, scientists could better understand what else might be in this planet’s atmosphere, and they could confirm if it has water. Further observations might not be able to confirm habitability or identify any life on the planet, but they could at least help us to better understand planets like this.
With this being the first planet of its kind discovered, further exploration will help us to put the pieces together. But it is certainly a major step forward in the eternal human quest to answer the question: are we alone?
This work was described in a study published in the journal Science.
David Bowie Jul 9, 2015 The official music video for David Bowie – Space Oddity from Bowie’s second studio album ‘David Bowie’ released in 1969 (aka Space Oddity), of which this was the only single.
Proof Jul 15, 2026 Did the James Webb Space Telescope really see Pluto for the first time—and why are some people saying it “shouldn’t be possible”? Although Pluto was famously explored up close by New Horizons in 2015, James Webb observes the dwarf planet in an entirely different way. Instead of taking close-up visible-light photographs, Webb uses its powerful infrared instruments to analyze Pluto’s atmosphere, surface ices, temperature, and chemical composition with unprecedented sensitivity. These observations are helping scientists investigate how Pluto’s thin nitrogen atmosphere changes over time, how methane and carbon monoxide ice behave in extreme cold, and how the distant dwarf planet continues to evolve billions of kilometers from the Sun. Despite sensational headlines, there is nothing impossible about James Webb observing Pluto. The telescope was designed to study faint infrared objects throughout the Solar System and far beyond. What makes these observations extraordinary is the level of detail Webb can detect—not the fact that it can see Pluto. In this documentary, you’ll discover: Why James Webb observed Pluto despite New Horizons already visiting it. How infrared astronomy reveals details invisible to ordinary telescopes. What scientists learned about Pluto’s atmosphere and frozen surface. How Pluto compares to other icy worlds in the Kuiper Belt. The latest discoveries from NASA’s most powerful space telescope. The difference between scientific breakthroughs and sensational internet headlines. Join us as we explore how James Webb is giving astronomers an entirely new perspective on one of the Solar System’s most mysterious worlds. ???? Do you think Pluto should still be considered the ninth planet? Share your thoughts in the comments!
By Mike Wall
Last updated yesterday (Space.com)
Liftoff occurred at 10:47 a.m. ET, and the spaceflyers reached the ISS three hours later.
The International Space Station has three new residents.
NASA’s Anil Menon and cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov and Anna Kikina lifted off atop a Russian Soyuz rocket from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 10:47 a.m. EDT (1447 GMT; 7:47 p.m. local time in Baikonur), heading toward the orbiting lab.
Their Soyuz executed nominal side booster separation about two minutes after launch, followed by second stage separation about 2.5 minutes later, as the rocket flew at 105 miles (169 kilometers) in altitude. Third stage orbital insertion and separation was completed at about 8 minutes and 46 seconds, putting Russia’s Soyuz MS-29 spacecraft and crew on course to chase down the International Space Station (ISS).
The trio caught up to the ISS after just two orbits, docking with the outpost at 1:52 p.m. EDT (1752 GMT). The two spacecraft were flying 260 miles (418 kilometers) above the Mediterranean Sea at the time, NASA officials said during the agency’s docking webcast.
That webcast will resume at 3:30 p.m. EDT (1930 GMT) ahead of the opening of the hatches between the Soyuz and the ISS, which is expected around 3:55 p.m. EDT (1955 GMT).You may like
The MS-29 trio will join the seven astronauts already living aboard the ISS — NASA’s Jessica Meir, Jack Hathaway, and Chris Williams, the European Space Agency‘s Sophie Adenot, and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, Sergei Mikaev, and Andrey Fedyaev of the Russian space agency Roscosmos.
This is the first spaceflight for Menon, who was selected as a NASA astronaut candidate in December 2021, in the agency’s Group 23. He’s married to Anna Menon, who was picked in the next astronaut candidate class, Group 24, in September 2025.
Anna Menon has already been to space, though not with NASA. In September 2024, while an employee of SpaceX, she flew on the company’s Polaris Dawn mission to Earth orbit. That five-day flight, which was funded and commanded by current NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, featured the first-ever commercial spacewalk and reached a maximum altitude of 870 miles (1,400.7 kilometers) — higher than any previous crewed Earth-orbiting mission had gotten.
Anil Menon is a former SpaceX-er as well; he was the company’s first-ever flight surgeon.
MS-29’s flight is the second-ever space mission for both Dubrov and Kikina. Dubrov lived aboard the ISS from April 2021 to March 2022, and Kikina spent five months on the outpost, from October 2022 to March 2023.What to read next
Kikina, the only female member of Russia’s active astronaut corps, flew to and from the ISS back then on SpaceX’s Crew-5 mission. That was a big deal: She was the first Russian ever to fly on a private U.S. spacecraft, and the first cosmonaut to fly on any American space vehicle since December 2002, when cosmonauts Valery Korzun and Sergey Treshchov came back to Earth from the ISS aboard the space shuttle Endeavour.
The MS-29 trio will spend about eight months living and working on the orbiting lab. Menon will help conduct a wide variety of scientific experiments during that stretch.
“He will continue research to refine in-space production of semiconductor crystals to enable the large-scale manufacturing of components needed for high-performance computers, artificial intelligence, and improved medical devices,” NASA officials wrote in a July 9 media advisory.
“Menon also will perform ultrasound using augmented reality and artificial intelligence methods that could eliminate the need for medical support from Earth on future space missions,” they added.
Editor’s note: This story was updated at 1:55 p.m. ET with news of successful docking.
Spaceflight and Tech Editor
Michael Wall is the Spaceflight and Tech Editor for Space.com and joined the team in 2010. He primarily covers human and robotic spaceflight, military space, and exoplanets, but has been known to dabble in the space art beat. His book about the search for alien life, “Out There,” was published on Nov. 13, 2018. Before becoming a science writer, Michael worked as a herpetologist and wildlife biologist. He has a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from the University of Sydney, Australia, a bachelor’s degree from the University of Arizona, and a graduate certificate in science writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz. To find out what his latest project is, you can follow Michael on Twitter.
Proof Jul 5, 2026 Did Voyager 1 really turn around in deep space and make a discovery that scientists can’t explain? The internet is filled with dramatic claims about NASA’s most distant spacecraft—but what does the scientific evidence actually show? Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 has traveled farther from Earth than any other human-made object, venturing into interstellar space and sending back invaluable data about the mysterious region beyond our Solar System. Despite its age and immense distance, the spacecraft continues to provide scientists with unique measurements of cosmic rays, magnetic fields, plasma waves, and the interstellar medium. While viral headlines claim Voyager 1 “turned around” or discovered something impossible, there is no verified evidence that the spacecraft physically turned around or made an unexplained discovery matching those claims. Instead, NASA engineers continue to receive engineering and scientific data that help researchers better understand the boundary between our Solar System and interstellar space. In this video, we’ll explore: The latest updates from Voyager 1. What the spacecraft is actually transmitting. How Voyager communicates across billions of miles. The incredible discoveries it has made beyond the heliosphere. The truth behind sensational online headlines. Join us as we separate science fact from fiction and uncover the remarkable story of humanity’s most distant explorer.
Published yesterday (Space.com)
“The worst-case scenario consists of four astronauts on the moon at one time, only one month resupply window between Earth and moon, and moderate to high adverse environmental probabilities.”
The success of NASA’s future moon base depends in large part on mission design, which should allow astronauts to work together well in a way independent from psychological training, a new study asserts.
The goal of the study was to identify “specific conditions” for mission success and to look for any “red flags” that may stand in the way, lead investigator Anamaria Berea, a computational social scientist at George Mason University (GMU), told Space.com via email. (The first author of the PLOS ONE study, which was published in May, was GMU’s Raymond Vera.)
The team conducted the research using agent-based models, which are tools for computational simulations in fields ranging from the study of bird flocks to the spread of disease, Berea said. While a lot of modern-day AI “trains” or “learns” to extrapolate from information provided in a data set, agent-based modeling instead uses a data set to “understand emergent phenomena that don’t have one single cause or direct cause,” she said.
The study team considered scenarios for how many astronauts would be on the moon base and how often resupply missions would occur. In an “initial case,” for example, the assumed mission duration was three months, with a single resupply run at Month 2 with food, water, air and a fresh group of astronauts.
Using a complex probability analysis known as a Monte Carlo simulation, the model astronauts in this scenario showed a productivity rate of about 20% against their expected tasks, “which is acceptable for a typical manufacturing process,” the authors noted.You may like
This productivity rate doesn’t take into account anything unexpected that may crop up during the mission, the authors added. “The low task completion rate suggests that, on average, teams are having challenges to overcoming psychological stressors and environmental disruptions,” they wrote.
NASA tracks productivity a little differently on the International Space Station (ISS). The agency uses a metric called “utilization,” which largely refers to the amount of crew time and number of scientific investigations that are performed on the space station during an increment or expedition. As of 2014, the ISS program suggested that ideal utilization should be 35 hours per crew per week when there are three people working on the U.S. part of the space station, and 68.5 hours if there are four or more. (The Russian side of the ISS works largely independently in this respect.)
“NASA has generally met or exceeded this goal and set a high of 120 average hours per week devoted to research from October 2019 to April 2020,” NASA’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG), which has been tracking all of these productivity figures, stated in a report published in September 2024.
“Starting March 2022 through March 2023, the latest published data, we have seen utilization near 90 hours per week,” the OIG noted. “In addition to the hours spent per week on research, the number of scientific investigations performed on-orbit has increased.”
Figure 1 of the OIG report also shows both crew time and scientific investigations increasing, as a trend, between 2000 and 2023, suggesting that utilization of the space station is continuing to grow. And this is despite periodic and documented disruptions that required astronauts to take a step back from being productive, such as emergency ammonia leaks requiring spacewalks, the 9/11 disaster, or sheltering in place during brief contingencies such as space debris passing within a few miles of the station.What to read next
Not all crew time can be used for utilization even if all goes well, however, as the station requires normal maintenance like cleaning, and astronauts also need daily time for sleep, meals and a little relaxation. Additionally, utilization tends to increase with larger crews on the space station compared with smaller ones, as maintenance becomes less of a burden with more hands to take on these tasks.
But “lack of redundancy” in key supply items to the space station does pose a risk to utilization, the OIG has noted. As just one example, SpaceX Crew Dragon capsules and Roscosmos Soyuz spacecraft are the only two vehicles that bring astronauts to the station right now. “The lack of redundancy and limited capabilities of both cargo and crew transportation increase the risk to NASA’s current and future ability to bring critical supplies, science, and crew to and from the station to maintain safe operations and full utilization of the ISS,” the OIG wrote in the report.
Those of us who have been on long car rides in a group, or who remember being in tight quarters with roommates or family during the pandemic, have some idea of what an isolated, confined environment (ICE) feels like: crowded, with limited resources, and possessing few connections with the outside world. Space serves as just one example of a true ICE; isolated research bases (like in Antarctica) or submarines have also been studied in the literature, according to a separate 2021 study in the journal Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews.
Put simply, ICE refers to a location where humans must work to a high standard in isolated and often dangerous circumstances, with only long-distance support (if possible) from a mission control or its equivalent. And, as the new study points out, a moon base would be a complex example of an isolated environment — one featuring not only resident astronauts but also rovers, other robots and occasional visiting crews.
“The premise for our modeling approach came from trying to understand better the human factors involved in crewed space missions, particularly the deep-space ones, for which we don’t have a lot of historical data,” Berea said.
That’s because only a handful of people have traveled beyond low Earth orbit — the two dozen who flew to lunar realms on Apollo missions in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the four astronauts of NASA’s Artemis 2 flight around the moon this past April.
“We ran various scenarios of space mission durations, number of astronauts, potentially unforeseen circumstances that can happen on the lunar surface or the habitat,” she said. The model suggested the missions with the highest probability of success would include six astronauts working on the moon at a time, with fresh supplies coming from Earth every two weeks, and no extreme fluctuations in the environment from things like radiation or a micrometeorite impact.
“In contrast, the worst-case scenario consists of four astronauts on the moon at one time, only one month resupply window between Earth and moon, and moderate to high adverse environmental probabilities,” Berea said. And, when asked if training is a factor in mitigating adverse effects, she did not necessarily agree that the years of work NASA and other agency astronauts put in would be more effective than shorter-duration training used for moon base analogs.
“People can be very, very well trained, but for long-duration or deep-space missions, there will always be a human factor involved,” she said. “We looked at combinations of skills and personalities in a team of astronauts, and there is a fine line between having a team that is too small and a team that is too large, and there are synergies and emergent behaviors that come from people interacting with each other and with their environment.
“The team is more than the sum of its people,” she continued. “The best ways to overcome these is not by more training, but by fine-tuning other aspects of the missions: the duration of the mission, the frequency of resupply missions, and the contingency plans for accidents and unforeseen conditions in extreme environments.”
NASA, however, puts its ISS crews through many years of remote environment training long before they float through the space station hatch — and Artemis 2 commander Reid Wiseman told The New Yorker that extensive psychosocial training led to the obvious closeness seen live among his own four lunar crewmates despite tight quarters (and vent line issues that led to occasional toilet trouble).
That psychological intervention during training was by design. “Preparation starts by recruiting mentally healthy people and then providing training to help them deal with potential situations and issues,” wrote the Canadian Space Agency of this training, citing NASA protocols. “Astronauts repeat this training often enough that they can anticipate their own reactions and those of their teammates. They also receive constant support from teams on the ground and have access to a variety of tools to help them deal with potentially difficult situations.”
Berea noted, however, that psychology forms a part (but is not the focus) of her teams’ simulation, including considering NASA TLX (task load index) scores and data, which measures coping and stress for astronauts. The researchers also considered case studies from analogs including Antarctic research missions and time aboard submarines or oil rigs, as some examples.
“We need to pay attention not only to the astronauts, but the team as a whole, and each team and space mission are unique. We will not be able to model these with statistics or AI,” she said. “But what we can do is to make sure that before we send any human to live and work on the moon, that we understand well the complexity of interactions and scenarios they will face during the mission, and we can help with that.”
Published yesterday (Space.com)
“All these discoveries from pioneering missions like Voyager and New Horizons teach us how little we know about what lies beyond.”
NASA’s New Horizons probe has woken up in good health nearly 6 billion miles away beyond Pluto after spending nearly a year in hibernation.
Traveling such vast distances between our solar system’s most remote objects means New Horizons often cruises for months at a time with little to do other than passively collect data. During these periods, the probe goes into a hibernation mode in which its instruments still collect data, but most other systems power down.
New Horizons entered just such a hibernation period last August, and has now woken up in “good health”, according to a NASA statement. The spacecraft is 5.9 billion miles (9.5 billion kilometers) from Earth, so far away that it takes around 9 hours for its radio signals to reach us. Now that it’s awake, New Horizons will begin transmitting the data it has collected over the last 321 days and letting its controllers on the ground know how its systems are faring in the cold, dark reaches of deep space.
So far, the probe appears to be in perfect health. “Every status report through this hibernation period was ‘green,’ meaning all was well aboard New Horizons each and every week,” said Alice Bowman, the New Horizons mission operations manager at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in the NASA statement.
New Horizons is the first and only flyby spacecraft to conduct a flyby of the Pluto system, which it did in 2015. Four years later, the plucky probe studied the most distant object ever explored in our solar system, the snowman-shaped planetesimal Arrokoth, while it was one billion miles (1.6 billion kilometers) past Pluto.You may like
Since then, the long-distance voyager has been probing the edge of our sun’s influence and studying objects in the Kuiper Belt, the cold, donut-shaped ring of icy objects that circles the outer solar system beyond Neptune.
New Horizons is currently speeding away from Earth at a rate of 300 million miles (483 million km) per year, according to NASA.
Three weeks from now, New Horizons will begin conducting a study of hydrogen in the outer heliosphere, the region of space influenced by the stream of charged particles blowing outward from the sun, known as the solar wind.
The data the probe is collecting at the farthest reaches of our solar system is the first of its kind. It could help scientists understand what happens at the boundary between the sun’s region of influence and interstellar space, known as the “termination shock.”
Only two spacecraft have crossed this boundary before, NASA’s twin Voyager probes. However, those far-flung explorers weren’t equipped with the same scientific instruments as New Horizons, which enable it to conduct more sensitive measurements of this distant region of the solar system.
“The data from the termination shock encounter will be a treasure trove for space physicists worldwide who are eager to understand how this vast boundary works,” Pontus Brandt, New Horizons project scientist at APL, previously told Space.com. “All these discoveries from pioneering missions like Voyager and New Horizons teach us how little we know about what lies beyond.”
The Horsehead Nebula (Barnard 33) rises from a cloud of dust and hydrogen some 1,600 light-years from Earth. Illuminated by nearby stars, its familiar silhouette reminds us that form and meaning often emerge together. Through different instruments, the horse may vanish, yet the underlying reality remains—inviting us to see anew. (from New Thinking Allowed)
NASA Streamed live on Jun 30, 2026 Watch a live, virtual conversation with NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman to hear progress on our plans to build a Moon Base on the lunar surface. Administrator Isaacman and Carlos García-Galán, Moon Base program manager, discuss the next set of awards for new lunar lander missions and preview upcoming opportunities as we work toward building a sustained presence on the Moon. More about the Moon Base: https://www.nasa.gov/moonbase Credit: NASA