Orbital science, astronomy, remote sensing, and what lies beyond the atmosphere.
NASA’s official New Horizons announcement marks a quiet milestone from one of the most remote spacecraft ever operated. After its longest hibernation period yet, the probe has awakened in good health far beyond Pluto and is preparing to return science data from the Kuiper Belt. The confirmation arrived on June 23 at the Johns Hopkins…
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A new arXiv study from the South Pole Telescope collaboration reports a catalog of 7,190 confirmed galaxy clusters found in five years of observations from Antarctica. The survey used the SPT-3G camera to search for faint distortions in the cosmic microwave background, the ancient afterglow of the Big Bang. The catalog is one of the…
A preprint study using James Webb Space Telescope data has identified the same unexplained infrared signal on two very different worlds, Saturn’s moon Titan and the dwarf planet Pluto. The feature appears near 5.11 micrometers, a wavelength where both bodies seem to absorb light in a way researchers haven’t yet matched to a known surface…
A 2026 arXiv preprint reports that NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has spotted strong and changing carbon monoxide emission from 55 Cancri e, a scorching lava planet about 41 light-years away. The study, submitted to Nature Astronomy, suggests that this rocky world has a hydrogen-rich atmosphere tied to gases rising from its molten interior.Using Webb…
