Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory sent a new four-wheel prototype, called ERNEST, into California’s Colorado Desert near Plaster City for a demanding field trial. Over 37 hours of driving time the machine covered about 16 miles while its autonomy software handled route planning and obstacle avoidance on its own. Team members stayed nearby to monitor progress but let the rover make its own decisions across daylight, dusk, and full nighttime conditions.
Astronomers have long studied dense collections of stars known as globular clusters scattered throughout the Milky Way. Most appear to have formed in one quick burst early on and then evolved quietly for billions of years. One object in the galaxy’s crowded central bulge always stood out a bit, though. New data has now shown why. Observations collected by the James Webb Space Telescope, working alongside archival records from the Hubble Space Telescope, have established that Terzan 5 contains not one but four distinct generations of stars. This discovery turns the object from a standard cluster into something researchers now call a bulge fossil fragment.
Photo credit: Katie Jameson/Caltech/DSA Project
Construction crews will soon start work on a remote valley floor in Nevada. Caltech astronomers intend to place 1,650 radio dishes across a rectangle roughly 20 kilometers long and 16 kilometers wide. The finished array will sweep the visible sky several times during its first five years of operation and move 100 times faster than any radio telescope now in use.
NASA picked Lunar Outpost to deliver a new crewed rover called Pegasus for the Artemis program. Astronauts will drive it across the lunar south pole starting around 2028. The vehicle brings a clear step up in what crews can accomplish during surface operations. It offers the range, endurance, and flexibility needed to support longer stays and the groundwork for a permanent outpost.
A dark ribbon of dust slices across the glowing heart of a spiral galaxy in Coma Berenices, creating the appearance that earned Messier 64 its well-known nickname, the Black Eye Galaxy. The feature stands out even in modest amateur telescopes, yet it only hints at far deeper activity inside.
Astronomers aimed NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope at a distant galaxy cluster called Abell S1063 with one goal in mind. They wanted to hunt for some of the very first stars that ever formed. What the telescope delivered instead turned out far more revealing. Tucked behind the cluster sat a faint red object known as GLIMPSE-17775. Gravity from the foreground cluster acted like a natural magnifying glass, stretching a 30-hour observation into the effective power of an 80-hour exposure. The result gave researchers the deepest spectrum ever captured of one of these mysterious little red dots.
Engineers as well as designers from Axiom Space and Prada pulled back the curtain last weekend in New York on the inner layer that will sit closest to astronauts during future lunar surface work. The garment forms a key piece of the AxEMU spacesuit developed for NASA’s Artemis program. Astronauts step into this form-fitting piece first. Light gray fabric stretches across the body in a streamlined silhouette while clear tubing traces deliberate paths over the torso, arms, and legs. A single red stripe runs down one sleeve as a quiet nod to Prada’s activewear roots.
Photo credit: NASA / Lori Losey
Lifting off from Edwards Air Force Base at 11:08 a.m. PDT on June 5, NASA test pilot Jim “Clue” Less guided the X-59 into the skies above the Mojave Desert. Eighty-one minutes later the aircraft returned to the runway after crossing the speed of sound for the first time.
Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 captured a stunning composite image of galaxy M88, which shows a massive spiral system twisted at an angle, stretching its appearance and displaying an orderly set of arms looping inward with exceptional symmetry. Pink knots represent the formation of new stars, blue clusters outline younger stellar populations, and darker red lanes highlight the disk’s dust. The galaxy’s nucleus is surrounded by older stars that emit a warm light.
Cameras positioned on the dunes just outside the new launch pad at Starbase captured something striking during the first flight of the upgraded vehicle on May 22. In normal playback SpaceX’s Starship V3 rocket rises on a column of fire and smoke. At 120 frames per second the same moment stretches into a slow, clear sequence where arcs of disturbance expand through the smoke, race outward across open ground, and keep moving into the air above.