NASA has sent numerous satellites as a part of the ongoing missions to explore the unknown phenomenon in space, and recently, they made the difficult decision to officially terminate its Lunar Trailblazer mission after months of attempts to recover the small orbiter. The mission was designed to find out some valuable facts by mapping and characterizing water reserves on the Moon’s surface.However, early on in its journey, the spacecraft lost communication and was presumed to be tumbling without sufficient power to operate. NASA recently announced the mission’s end, which came as a disappointing outcome for a project that was supposed to support future lunar missions.
What is the Lunar Trailblazer Mission
Lunar Trailblazer is a 200‑kg orbiter under NASA’s low‑cost SIMPLEx program, which was launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on February 26, 2025, as a rideshare on the IM‑2 mission to the Moon. About 48 minutes into the flight, it separated successfully, and initial contact was made later that evening from Caltech’s IPAC in Pasadena.However, by early morning the next day, communication was lost due to intermittent power problems, and engineers soon found out that the spacecraft was spinning and unable to keep its solar panels pointed toward the Sun, according to information by NASA.
NASA tried to recover the lost contact
NASA worked tirelessly through spring and summer, attempting to reestablish contact in mid‑June and early July. Teams from NASA’s Deep Space Network and various international observatories monitored the orbiter’s trajectory, orientation, and potential sunlight exposure.Scientists hoped that if enough sunlight hit the spacecraft’s solar panels, the batteries might get enough charge for the Lunar Trailblazer to wake up and send a signal again. NASA even had backup plans ready in case they managed to reconnect and keep the mission going.Despite these consistent efforts, Lunar Trailblazer drifted beyond the Moon and into deep space, spinning ever more slowly and becoming too distant to command or receive telemetry. Teams at JPL and Caltech finally acknowledged the mission could no longer yield scientific results, leading NASA to officially end it on July 31, 2025.
This unsuccessful mission is a lesson for future missions
According to reports by NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, “At NASA, we undertake high‑risk, high‑reward missions like Lunar Trailblazer to find revolutionary ways of doing new science,” said Nicky Fox, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. “While it was not the outcome we had hoped for, mission experiences like Lunar Trailblazer help us to learn and reduce the risk for future, low‑cost small satellites to do innovative science as we prepare for a sustained human presence on the Moon.”
The trailblazer had a companion
Lunar Trailblazer shared its ride with the Athena lander, part of Intuitive Machines’ IM‑2 mission. Athena successfully touched down near the lunar south pole on March 6, 2025, but shortly thereafter toppled over. In a compromised orientation, its solar panels could not recharge the batteries, ending its surface mission prematurely, delivering only limited data before it went silent the next day.
An international team of scientists have provided an unprecedented tally of elemental sulfur spread between the stars using data from the Japan-led XRISM (X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission) spacecraft.
Astronomers used X-rays from two binary star systems to detect sulfur in the interstellar medium, the gas and dust found in the space between stars. It’s the first direct measurement of both sulfur’s gas and solid phases, a unique capability of X-ray spectroscopy, XRISM’s (pronounced “crism”) primary method of studying the cosmos.
“Sulfur is important for how cells function in our bodies here on Earth, but we still have a lot of questions about where it’s found out in the universe,” said Lía Corrales, an assistant professor of astronomy at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “Sulfur can easily change from a gas to a solid and back again. The XRISM spacecraft provides the resolution and sensitivity we need to find it in both forms and learn more about where it might be hiding.”
A paper about these results, led by Corrales, published June 27 in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Japan.
Using ultraviolet light, researchers have found gaseous sulfur in the space between stars. In denser parts of the interstellar medium, such as the molecular clouds where stars and planets are born, this form of sulfur quickly disappears.
Scientists assume the sulfur condenses into a solid, either by combining with ice or mixing with other elements.
When a doctor performs an X-ray here on Earth, they place the patient between an X-ray source and a detector. Bone and tissue absorb different amounts of the light as it travels through the patient’s body, creating contrast in the detector.
To study sulfur, Corrales and her team did something similar.
They picked a portion of the interstellar medium with the right density — not so thin that all the X-rays would pass through unchanged, but also not so dense that they would all be absorbed.
Then the team selected a bright X-ray source behind that section of the medium, a binary star system called GX 340+0 located over 35,000 light-years away in the southern constellation Scorpius.
Using the Resolve instrument on XRISM, the scientists were able to measure the energy of GX 340+0’s X-rays and determined that sulfur was present not only as a gas, but also as a solid, possibly mixed with iron.
“Chemistry in environments like the interstellar medium is very different from anything we can do on Earth, but we modeled sulfur combined with iron, and it seems to match what we’re seeing with XRISM,” said co-author Elisa Costantini, a senior astronomer at the Space Research Organization Netherlands and the University of Amsterdam. “Our lab has created models for different elements to compare with astronomical data for years. The campaign is ongoing, and soon we’ll have new sulfur measurements to compare with the XRISM data to learn even more.”
Iron-sulfur compounds are often found in meteorites, so scientists have long thought they might be one way sulfur solidifies out of molecular clouds to travel through the universe.
In their paper, Corrales and her team propose a few compounds that would match XRISM’s observations — pyrrhotite, troilite, and pyrite, which is sometimes called fool’s gold.
The researchers were also able to use measurements from a second X-ray binary called 4U 1630-472 that helped confirm their findings.
“NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory has previously studied sulfur, but XRISM’s measurements are the most detailed yet,” said Brian Williams, the XRISM project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “Since GX 340+0 is on the other side of the galaxy from us, XRISM’s X-ray observations are a unique probe of sulfur in a large section of the Milky Way. There’s still so much to learn about the galaxy we call home.”
XRISM is led by JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) in collaboration with NASA, along with contributions from ESA (European Space Agency). NASA and JAXA developed Resolve, the mission’s microcalorimeter spectrometer.
Sunspot region 4168 is certainly making quite a name for itself!
Earlier this week, active region 4168 churned out three M-class flares within 24 hours, ending weeks of calm on the sun. Then, on Aug. 5, it fired off a strong M4.4-class flare, peaking at 11:58 a.m. EDT (15:58 GMT), and hurled a coronal mass ejection (CME) into space. But though the eruption came from almost smack-dab in the center of the sun‘s disk, a spot that usually spells “bullseye” for Earth, this one had a trick up its sleeve.
Instead of heading straight for us, the CME launched sideways, flinging most of its plasma westward, away from Earth. Still, space weather forecasters say there is a chance Earth may still receive a glancing blow from the CME on Aug. 8, which could trigger a minor (G1) geomagnetic storm, potentially sparking northern lights as far south as northern Michigan and Maine.
“Virtually center disk flare, CME goes sideways. Just Solar Cycle 25 things,” aurora chaser Jure Atanackov posted on X, summing up the oddball behavior.
Even so, Earth might not entirely be in the clear. Atanackov pointed to NASA’s WSA-ENLIL model, which “indicates the CME from the M4.4 flare may (despite its best efforts) still clip us.” The model suggests a potential impact around 2:00 a.m. EDT (0600 UTC) on Aug. 8 — with a generous margin of error of ±8 hours.
CME impact? The NASA M2M WSA-ENLIL+Cone model indicates the CME from the M4.4 flare may (despite its best efforts) still clip us. The glancing blow is indicated on August 8th around 6h UTC (+/- 8 hrs). https://t.co/jFP7bSwulk pic.twitter.com/4XVMiAuLBLAugust 6, 2025
The U.K. Met Office agrees there’s potential, noting that “as this region was located near the centre disk at the time, there is a likelihood of an Earth-directed component.” However, they also say confidence in that forecast is low.
Sunspots visible on the sun today (Aug. 6). The sun’s orientation from Earth-based telescopes varies depending on time, location, and telescope setup. This image has been adjusted to match how space-based observatories like NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory view the sun — with solar north up. (Image credit: Created in Canva Pro by Daisy Dobrijevic. Sun image captured on Aug. 6, 2025 with Vaonis Vespera Pro.)
If the CME does brush past Earth, we could see auroras stretch south into high and even mid-latitudes, but only if the storm’s magnetic orientation (a key ingredient for auroras) cooperates. Essentially, the CME’s magnetic field needs to point southward — opposite to Earth’s northward field — to effectively connect and transfer energy into our magnetosphere. If it points north instead, the “door is closed” and solar wind simply glances off, and the auroras may be a no-show.
For now, we wait and watch. As always with the sun — stay tuned.
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Researchers at the University of Southern California (USC) in the US turned to an often overlooked particle for storing and processing quantum information to overcome the fragility of quantum computers and make them more universal in the near future.
Positioning one such particle in a quantum computer can help overcome errors in quantum computing, a university press release said.
The age of quantum computing promises computations at speeds that will make even the fastest supercomputers of today appear like snails. These computers leverage quantum properties of materials to store information in quantum bits or ‘qubits’.
Unlike binary bits that occupy either a 0 or 1 position, qubits can occupy a whole range of positions in between, allowing them to store and process more information.
The hurdle with large-scale deployment of these systems is that they are extremely fragile and can be easily disrupted by their environment.
These disruptions add errors to the computation, which accumulate faster in quantum systems, making them unreliable without error correction.
Researchers have been working on various strategies for error correction, with topological quantum computing being one of the most promising approaches.
Topological quantum computing
In this approach, researchers work to secure quantum information by encoding it into the geometric properties of exotic particles called anyons.
Predicted to exist in two dimensions, anyons are considered more resistant to noise and interference than other qubits, with Ising anyons leading the development of these quantum systems.
However, Ising anyons alone are insufficient to build a general-purpose quantum computer.
“The computations they support rely on ‘braiding,’ physically moving anyons around one another to carry out quantum logic,” explained Aaron Lauda, professor of mathematics, physics, and astronomy at USC.
“For Ising anyons, this braiding only enables a limited set of operations known as Clifford gates, which fall short of the full power required for universal quantum computing,” Lauda, who was involved in the research, added in the press release.
To overcome these challenges, Lauda and his team of physicists and mathematicians focused on a new class of mathematical theories called non-semisimple topological quantum field theories (TQFTs).
Here, they found the often neglected components they now refer to as ‘neglectons’.
What are neglectons?
In conventional semisimple frameworks that physicists used to describe anyons, models often discard objects with a “quantum trace zero”. This is arrived at mathematically and often neglected.
But this is where Lauda and his team found the missing piece, where everybody thought was “mathematical garbage”.
Their new non-semisimple framework does not discard these components and reveals a new type of anyon, which they dubbed neglecton. Combined with Ising anyons, the neglectons can achieve universal computing using braiding alone.
Interestingly, only one neglecton is needed, which remains stationary while Ising anyons are braided around it.
Using the non-semisimple framework also raises irregularities that can disrupt the probability of quantum mechanics. This is why others have stayed away from deploying them in quantum computing.
But Lauda and his team designed a nifty workaround to this problem with a quantum encoding that takes the irregularities away from the computation.
“Think of it like designing a quantum computer in a house with some unstable rooms,” explained Lauda further in the press release.
“Instead of fixing every room, you ensure all of your computing happens in the structurally sound areas while keeping the problematic spaces off-limits.”
With the math sorted, it is now up to the experimentalists to ensure that the neglecton is added to the quantum setup and work towards building a universal quantum computer.
The research findings were published in Nature Communications.
Ingenuity marked a number of milestones in space exploration. Arguably most importantly, it proved that powered flight was possible on another planet. However, it did have some limitations, such as being tied to the Perseverance rover and there only being one copy of the helicopter itself. AV Inc, one of the sub-contractors for Ingenuity, hopes to fix those problems with a proposed new mission called Skyfall that would involve six helicopters and no rover.
Skyfall, which assumedly was at least partially named after the famous James Bond movie / ranch, is intended to scout potential mission locations for upcoming human missions. The helicopters will report back stable landing sites as well as the presence of resources such as water ice.
One of Skyfall’s primary advantages is the sheer amount of ground it can cover. With six helicopters, each of which is designed to operate independently and connect directly with Earth, the mission could far outpace any alternative scouting mission architectures. How exactly each helicopter would carry a communications system powerful enough to do that without being massively bigger, and therefore more of a drain on its battery, is unclear at this point.
Another advantage is its deployment scheme. Skyfall will also literally fall from the sky, but using the helicopters under their own power to descend to the planet’s surface after deploying from a landing vehicle. This would eliminate one of the most dangerous parts of any Mars mission – the actual landing.
AV Inc has form in sticking those even, or at least not having their system fall apart upon landing. As such, they plan to utilize many of the technologies originally developed for Ingenuity. After all, why fix something that operated successfully 32 times longer than originally planned. Also, Ingenuity was delivered on time and on budget – a relative rarity with novel space missions.
Video from AV describing the Skyfall mission. Credit – AV YouTube Channel
That fast work paced will serve the company well, as Skyfall is planned for launch during the 2028 Mars launch window. Meaning they would have a little more than three years to design, develop, test, and launch a complete Skyfall system. While by no means impossible, that is a pretty fast timeline in terms of mission development, even if much of the hardware is being reused from past ones.
But AV Inc seems up to the challenge – they are already putting their own resources into the mission, and were excited enough to issue a press release a few weeks ago. However, they will need support from NASA – specifically the Jet Propulsion Laboratory that helped them with Ingenuity’s design. Even though JPL plans to offload more of their responsibilities for Skyfall, there’s still the looming budget crisis at NASA to contend with.
Budget is probably the biggest potential hindrance to AV Inc’s plans at this point – they’ve already proven they can make the primary factor (i.e. controlled flight) of the mission work. With a little bit more development of the deployment mechanism, they could definitely have a functional system in three years. We’ll just have to see if there’s enough support in NASA’s space agency to continue development – but given that a major reason for the re-budgeting was to push more work onto private contractors, there’s hope for the Skyfall mission yet.
Fraser discusses the other helicopters that might be going to Mars.
Learn More:
AV Inc – AV Reveals Skyfall: Future Concept Next-Gen Mars Helicopters for Exploration and Human Landing Preparation
UT – Exploring Mars with Next-Generation Helicopters
UT – A Mars Chopper Mission Over Glaciers and Canyons
UT – Exploring Valles Marineris on Mars with Helicopters, Not Rovers
The Royal Society has agreed plans that would make its journals fully open access in 2026 by adopting the ‘Subscribe to Open’ model.
Under plans agreed in July 2025, libraries subscribed to Royal Society journals will now be asked to support Subscribe to Open in 2026 through their subscriptions. If sufficient libraries continue their subscriptions, the journals will be converted to open access for the year.
The plan would make research papers published in its eight world-class subscription journals, including the world’s oldest peer-reviewed journals, Philosophical Transactions A and B, freely available online and remove fees for authors to publish in them.
Subscribe to Open is a cost-effective, high-impact and equitable way for publishers to transition to open access. The agreement works by allowing publishers to convert journals from subscriptions to open access, one year at a time. This would mean the journals become free to read and publish in for any author or reader, not just those associated with a subscribed library.
Under the current hybrid model authors can choose to pay Article Processing Charges (APCs) to make their article open access and available to read for free. With Subscribe to Open, these charges would disappear.
The Royal Society will repeat the offer in subsequent years while continuing to work with libraries, institutions and consortia to establish Read and Publish agreements which provide a sustainable model of open access in the longer term.
Earlier this year, the Society agreed a Read and Publish deal with Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES). This allows Brazilian authors affiliated with CAPES-supported institutions to publish in the Royal Society’s journals, including the two open access journals Royal Society Open Science and Open Biology, without APCs.
Rod Cookson, Royal Society Publishing Director, said: “This is an exciting opportunity to move our journals to open access as early as next year. Subscribe to Open will help us transition more quickly and equitably, and is the right approach at this stage of our open access journey. Most importantly, it will make the Society’s journals stronger in the future, by reaching more readers and a wider range of researchers around the world.”
Professor Sir Mark Walport FRS, Vice President and Chair of the Royal Society’s Publishing Board, said: “The Royal Society has a long history of transformative scientific publishing. This proposal is a natural next step which, along with the Society’s ongoing review on the Future of scientific publishing, continues the tradition of innovation it has brought to scholarly communication since launching the world’s first scientific journal in 1665.”
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The eye of the apple snail is unusually similar to a human eye-but, unlike human eyes, it can regrow itself if injured or even amputated. New research from the Stowers Institute for Medical Research has established the apple snail as a novel research organism to study eye regeneration, with the potential to better understand and find treatments for eye conditions in humans like macular degeneration.
The study, from the lab of Stowers President and Chief Scientific Officer Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado, Ph.D., published in Nature Communications on [date], describes a new system to study sensory organ regeneration in the apple snail, Pomacea canaliciulata. Led by former Postdoctoral Research Associate Alice Accorsi, Ph.D., now an Assistant Professor at the University of California, Davis, the research team discovered that the apple snail has complex camera-type eyes like humans and also developed tools to alter its genome, resulting in snails with stable gene variations that can help researchers better understand the process of regeneration.
“Our eyes are extremely important for perceiving our environment, yet when damaged are unable to recover,” said Accorsi.
Essentially we had no way to identify solutions for treating conditions like retinal degeneration or physical injury to the eye. But nature has answers for us. We now have a tractable system for investigating which genes are responsible for camera-type eye regeneration.”
Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado, Ph.D., Stowers President and Chief Scientific Officer
The process of apple snail eye regeneration from amputation to full restoration occurs in four stages over 28 days: wound healing, formation of a special cell mass, emergence of a lens and retina, and the maturation of all eye components. Because vertebrates including humans can only perform the first stage, wound healing, the researchers are looking at where regeneration and development diverge and are trying to identify what switch snails use to reactivate new eye development.
Apple snails have eyes that are anatomically similar to vertebrate eyes, including those in humans, with a lens, cornea, and retina. The researchers identified that a gene called pax6-known to play a crucial role in vertebrate and fruit fly eye development-is also present in apple snails.
“A key gene governing eye development in vertebrates is pax6, and we showed for the first time that apple snails not only have pax6 but also that this gene is critical for their eyes to develop,” said Accorsi.
In the lab, the team optimized the gene-editing technique CRISPR-Cas9 for apple snails that allowed them to disrupt pax6 gene function. The new line of snails was healthy yet noticeably missing their eyes.
“There were two big moments where I felt this was something that could be important for the entire scientific community,” said Accorsi. “The first was discovering that the snail eye was just like a human eye. The second was observing these tiny embryos without eyes after disrupting pax6, and realizing we can use snails as a system for understanding gene function.”
“To have a research system that regenerates eyes, combined with the ability to do genetics in that system is among the first efforts in the history of science to gain a mechanistic understanding of the processes that underpin the restoration of a sensory organ as complex as the eye-from injury all the way to its regeneration,” said Sánchez Alvarado.
Angus Davison, Ph.D., a professor at the University of Nottingham commented on the potential of the study. “Previously, progress in understanding mollusks and their genomes has been limited because there is no widely used genetically tractable species,” he said. “This work showcases the potential of apple snails as a novel system to uncover the genetic mechanisms behind mollusk development.”
For each stage of eye regeneration, the team collected and analyzed gene activity. This information about the timing of gene expression can be used to narrow down which genes are likely most promising for eye regeneration.
“We now have a list of candidate genes,” said Accorsi. “Going forward, we plan to disrupt these genes to test if they are required for regeneration and development of the eye.”
“With a little bit of effort, a little bit of ingenuity, and a great deal of persistence, biology that seemed inaccessible is no longer a pipe dream,” said Sánchez Alvarado. “Our work with the apple snails is proof positive-it really is possible to bring something that was far beyond what we thought we could do into the realm of real possibility to advance biological knowledge.”
“It was a big risk,” said Sánchez Alvarado. “But it worked.”
Source:
Stowers Institute for Medical Research
Journal reference:
Accorsi, A., et al. (2025). A genetically tractable non-vertebrate system to study complete camera-type eye regeneration. Nature Communications. doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-61681-6
Glaciers in Washington, Montana, British Columbia, Alberta and the Swiss Alps lost an unprecedented amount of ice between 2021 and 2024, a new study reveals.
The cumulative loss in these four years was double that recorded between 2010 and 2020, shrinking glaciers by up to 13%, researchers found. Glaciers in the U.S. and Canada lost 24.5 billion tons (22.2 billion metric tons) of ice per year on average, while glaciers in the Swiss Alps lost 1.7 billion tons (1.5 billion metric tons) of ice per year.
“Previous records were shattered,” study co-author Matthias Huss, a lecturer in the Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, told Live Science in an email. “We knew that these extreme glacier melt rates would come up. Nevertheless, the day you go out and witness these results based on the measurements, it is still surprising and difficult to accept.”
The studied glaciers are located in regions where there is “very good, almost real-time, observational coverage,” Huss said. The yearly losses of ice from these glaciers between 2021 and 2024, as well as the total loss of ice measured during this period, are record-breaking.
“Meteorological conditions that favored high rates of mass loss included low winter snow accumulation, early-season heat waves, and prolonged warm, dry conditions,” the researchers wrote in the new study, published June 25 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
Between 2000 and 2023, glaciers around the world collectively lost 301 billion tons (273 billion metric tons) of ice per year, contributing to around one-fifth of observed sea-level rise, according to the study. The aim of the new research was to determine whether the past four years of glacier melt stood out from previous years.
Related: World’s glaciers are losing enough ice to fill 3 Olympic pools every second, terrifying new study finds
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The researchers found that 2021 to 2024 was the worst period for ice loss since glacier monitoring began in the 1960s. Glacier ice loss was extreme over the four-year period, with one-tenth of all glacier ice in Switzerland melting away in just two years between 2022 and 2023, Huss said.
“It is interesting but also alerting to see that these extremes are widespread and do not occur only in a single region but globally, even though the exact timing of the most important melt years is often not the same,” he said.
Glacier ice loss not only exacerbates sea level rise but also threatens freshwater availability, elevates the risk of geohazards and drastically alters mountain landscapes, according to the study.
Heat waves and wildfires
To examine glacier melt, the team used data from the World Glacier Monitoring Service and airborne surveys, as well as climate records and satellite observations. They fed this information into a computer model to evaluate mass changes for two U.S. glaciers, three Canadian glaciers and five Swiss glaciers. The two U.S. glaciers were the South Cascade Glacier in Washington state and the Sperry Glacier in Montana. The three Canadian glaciers were the Place, Peyto and Helm glaciers.
The decline of Montana’s Sperry Glacier shown in pictures and a map. The pictures show the glacier around 1930 and in 2009. The map shows the extent of the glacier in 1950 (blue) and 2014 (black). (Image credit: GlacierNPS (top and bottom left); USGS (right))
The South Cascade Glacier in August 2000 (left) compared with September 2006 (right). (Image credit: USGS via Getty Images)
Both in North America and Switzerland, one of the biggest factors driving glacier melt was extremely high summer temperatures. A heat wave in June 2021 in the U.S. and western Canada resulted in huge snowpack losses, and another heat wave in 2023 caused an early start to the wildfire season, which indirectly affected glaciers through soot particles that darkened the ice.
Darker surfaces from soot and other impurities absorb more radiation from the sun than light surfaces do, leading to more melt. More melt exposes vegetation, which is even darker than darkened ice and, therefore, leads to more heat absorption. This additional heat absorption on Earth’s surface gradually contributes to global warming, as the heat is no longer reflected back out to space, which, in turn, leads to more wildfires and more soot deposition.
Another important factor driving glacier melt was the loss of firn zones, which are areas where snow has not yet been compressed into ice. The snow in these zones has a granular texture that helps to retain meltwater and prevent runoff, and it also reflects more sunlight back out to space than ice does, according to the study.
Computer models of glaciers do not currently account for firn zones and the influence of soot and other impurities. The effects of extreme weather events, such as wildfires and heat waves, should also be considered, the study authors argued.
Peak glacier ice loss
The study also found that ice loss from glaciers may have peaked between 2021 and 2024, raising serious concerns about water management in some regions, Huss said.
“It is not that melting will decline in the future with additional warming but the huge losses have resulted in rapidly shrinking ice cover and in some regions even a complete disappearance of small glaciers,” he said.
This means that glaciers may now release less water into rivers and streams than they did up until 2024, even if global temperatures keep increasing. Communities, agriculture and industries that rely on glacier meltwater may therefore see their supply dwindle in the coming years.
The results are alarming and “clearly fit the global trend,” Huss said. However, it’s important to note that “we are highlighting two regions [western U.S.-Canada and the Swiss Alps] with absolutely exceptional changes in single years that will not immediately be reflected in all regions,” he said.
A landmark on Pluto that was previously designated as an impact crater may actually be the caldera of a supervolcano that has exploded in the past few million years, new research suggests.
When NASA’s New Horizons mission flew by Pluto in 2015, it revealed a geologically rich world, rather than the cold, dark landscape many had anticipated. Almost immediately, researchers identified two features, called Wright Mons and Piccard Mons, that were strongly suspected to be icy volcanoes, and further study confirmed their identity.
But not every cryovolcano was easy to spot. The suspected supervolcano, Kiladze, was initially classified as an impact crater. However, now scientists suspect it’s something else.
“We evaluated the possibility of the depression as a cryovolcanic caldera versus having an impact crater origin,” said Al Emran, a planetary scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. Emran presented his team’s results in July at the Progress in Understanding the Pluto System: 10 Years After Flyby conference in Laurel, Maryland.
“We think it’s more like Yellowstone Caldera in Wyoming,” Emran said. At least two of Yellowstone’s eruptions, millions of years ago, reached supervolcano status.
Impact crater or caldera?
Kiladze remains listed as a crater. But the rich supply of water ice surrounding the bowl-shaped feature sparked Emran’s curiosity, and he wondered if it might be a cryovolcano instead.
At first glance, the elongated oval bears a strong similarity to an impact crater. It’s large, with an average diameter of 2.5 miles (4 kilometers). Its walls are irregularly shaped, and the complex features it would require could easily have been eroded by Pluto’s active surface processes.
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The landscape itself is marked by pits and other geological features, many of which have collapsed. If an incoming impactor broke through the surface and exposed veins of frozen lava beneath, it could have created the explosive distribution of water ice seen on the surface.
But when Emran dug into the topography maps of Pluto created by the New Horizons team, he realized there was a problem: The crater was too deep. Across the solar system, crater depth scales with crater diameter in a predictable way, and the same law appeared to hold true for other craters on Pluto — but for not Kiladze.
At best, estimates put an impact crater of its size at 1.7 miles (2.74 km) wide. But with the activity flowing across Pluto, material would have been more likely to fill in the crater over time, making it even shallower. Haze particles would have piled up, and melting or slumping ices would have fallen inward.
An image of Kiladze. (Image credit: USGS Astrogeology Science Center)
However, Kiladze isn’t shallower than projected; it’s deeper. Parts of the basin reach 2.5 deep, and the entire site averages nearly 2 miles (3 km) in depth.
For these reasons, Emran and his colleagues suspect that Kiladze is a caldera, a massive depression created by the eruption and subsequent collapse of a volcano. Magma — or cryomagma — spewing from the surface rapidly over a short period of time can weaken the supporting material, causing it to collapse inward on itself.
Despite the supervolcano’s collapse, the eruptive power of Kiladze would have been impressive. Emran and his colleagues calculated that the explosion could have ejected as much as 240 cubic miles (1,000 cubic kilometers) of icy cryomagma across the surrounding region, achieving the definition of a supervolcano. Although Yellowstone has erupted more than 80 times over its lifetime of more than 2 million years, only two explosions have been classified as supervolcanic.
Kiladze may have blasted out its cryomagma in a single explosive event, or it may have spread its eruptions over time. Either way, its most recent event spewed water ice at least 60 miles (100 km). Emran suspects that estimate is low, however, as more water ice is likely visible at resolutions smaller than New Horizons could reach.
“One or more cataclysmic explosive eruptions that resulted in the excavation and collapse of what is seen as the Kiladze caldera would be expected to scatter the water-ice cryomagma widely for a thousand or more kilometers, leaving exposures too small to be seen in the data at hand,” the authors wrote in a paper recently published in The Planetary Science Journal.
An infographic showing the process of caldera formation (Image credit: Trista L. Thornberry-Ehrlich, Colorado State University.)
Clues in the ice
Kiladze sits just north of Sputnik Planetia, the icy heart to Pluto. Although much of the dwarf planet’s surface is covered with a variety of ices, very little of the surface matches what you might find in your freezer at home. Temperatures on Pluto are so cold that water ice serves as the bedrock for the dwarf planet, while other ices pile on top.
But in the neighborhood surrounding Kiladze, water ice stretches across the surface. The ice has traces of an unidentified ammoniated compound. “It’s difficult to determine the exact composition,” Emran said. In fact, that particular signature of ammonia is not seen anywhere else on Pluto.
Ammonia may be what allows the frigid ice to flow. Its addition lowers the freezing point of water, allowing it to remain liquid for longer periods. Beneath the surface, pockets of water and ammonia could have avoided freezing as Pluto’s bedrock solidified. Eventually, tectonic pressure could have driven the icy magma to the surface, spewing it across the landscape around Kiladze, Emran explained.
The mysterious traces of ammonia could also help to date the cryovolcano. Pure ammonia is quickly obliterated by the solar wind, ultraviolet particles and cosmic rays. Its faint presence suggests that the latest eruption occurred fairly recently in Pluto’s history, Emran said.
Pluto’s haze can help to nail down geological activity. The light shroud covers the dwarf planet — a result of methane and other gases jumping from solid to gas. As the particles grow, they eventually fall back to the surface and spread all over the dwarf planet. Grounded haze particles would cover the water ice like a blanket, obscuring signs of the cryolava, Emran explained. If such a layer had formed, New Horizons would have seen nitrogen-rich ice instead of signs of water-rich volcanism.
Burying the water ice requires at least 0.4 inches (10 millimeters) of haze particles falling to Pluto. That process takes at least 3 million years, Emran said. That could mean Pluto isn’t as frozen as previously thought.
“If Kiladze erupted as recently as 3 million years ago, it would indeed suggest that Pluto’s interior may still retain some residual warmth today,” Emran said. “This aligns with the idea that cryovolcanism on Pluto could be ongoing or episodic.”
This zoomed-in image of Uranus, captured by the Near-Infrared Camera on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope on Feb. 6, 2023, reveals stunning views of Uranus’ rings.
NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI
Uranus, an ice giant planet and the seventh planet from the sun, may be warmer than previously thought. The third largest planet in the solar system — previously thought to be the coldest despite Neptune being farther from the sun — now appears to emit much more heat than it receives from the sun.
Most planets generate their own heat, so they emit more energy than they receive from the sun. That’s the case with Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune. It’s thought that the heat is leftover from the planet’s formation. However, data from Uranus — which is restricted to the one time NASA visited the planet 39 years ago — suggested that Uranus had no internal heat. That confused planetary scientists because it suggested Uranus was much older than the other planets.
“Since Voyager 2’s flyby, everybody has said Uranus has no internal heat,” said Amy Simon, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “But it’s been really hard to explain why that is, especially when compared with the other giant planets.”
Uranus: New Observations
New observations of reflected light from Uranus by Lowell Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope, published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society journal by scientists at NASA and Oxford University, suggest otherwise.
Creating a computer model of the planet’s atmosphere from decades of observations from ground- and space-based telescopes — from hazes and clouds to seasonal changes — the scientists figured out that Uranus actually reflects back 15% more energy than it receives from the sun. That’s much less than most planets, but warmer than long believed and indicating that it does have an internal heat source.
Uranus as captured by NASA’s Voyager 2 on January 14, 1986.
NASA/ JPL
Mission To Uranus
Humanity’s only glimpse of Uranus was in 1986 when NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft photographed it during its Grand Tour of the planets. A lot of its moons were imaged, too, but only some of their surface were in its view.
The Uranus Orbiter and Probe (UOP) is a concept for a mission to tour the Uranus system — including the ice giant itself and its moons — though the chances of it launching in time now seem slim. The need for a slingshot from Jupiter means that launch opportunities exist in the early 2030s for a journey to take 12-13 years. That window opens every 12 years or so when Jupiter returns to roughly the same position in the solar system.
What Color Is Uranus?
The news about the temperature of Uranus comes in the wake of another basic characteristic of the planet being reassessed. A study last year concluded that the belief that Uranus is pale cyan and Neptune is a deep azure blue is wrong. The study stated that the planets are actually a similar shade of greenish blue, and that the error was down to inaccurate color in NASA’s Voyager 2’s camera, which captured Uranus and Neptune in 1986 and 1989, respectively.
Moons Of Uranus
There are 27 moons around Uranus, four of which — Umbriel, Titania, Oberon and Ariel — are geologically active, and possibly ocean worlds. It’s one reason NASA needs to send a mission. Observations last year by the James Webb Space Telescope indicate that Ariel may have an underground liquid ocean. Its surface was found to contain carbon dioxide ice, mostly on the side of the moon that faces away from the direction it orbits, which may be coming from a liquid ocean beneath the surface.
