Category: 7. Science

One of the brightest and most colorful stars in the sky and the most brilliant planet are on stage in the early morning dawn sky this weekend and will be joined by the moon on Monday morning. The star in question is Aldebaran, a first-magnitude star that shines with a distinct orange hue and marks the right eye of Taurus, the Bull.

The brilliant planet is, of course, Venus, which outshines Aldebaran by almost five magnitudes or a light ratio difference of almost 100-fold. At this particular moment in time, both star and planet can be seen roughly one-quarter of the way up from the eastern horizon, roughly 45 minutes before sunrise.

The Chinese AI company DeepSeek released a chatbot earlier this year called R1, which drew a huge amount of attention. Most of it focused on the fact that a relatively small and unknown company said it had built a chatbot that rivaled the performance of those from the world’s most famous AI companies, but using a fraction of the computer power and cost. As a result, the stocks of many Western tech companies plummeted; Nvidia, which sells the chips that run leading AI models, lost more stock value in a single day than any company in history.

Some of that attention involved an element of accusation. Sources alleged that DeepSeek had obtained, without permission, knowledge from OpenAI’s proprietary o1 model by using a technique known as distillation. Much of the news coverage framed this possibility as a shock to the AI industry, implying that DeepSeek had discovered a new, more efficient way to build AI.

But distillation, also called knowledge distillation, is a widely used tool in AI, a subject of computer science research going back a decade and a tool that big tech companies use on their own models. “Distillation is one of the most important tools that companies have today to make models more efficient,” said Enric Boix-Adsera, a researcher who studies distillation at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

Dark Knowledge

The idea for distillation began with a 2015 paper by three researchers at Google, including Geoffrey Hinton, the so-called godfather of AI and a 2024 Nobel laureate. At the time, researchers often ran ensembles of models  — “many models glued together,” said Oriol Vinyals, a principal scientist at Google DeepMind and one of the paper’s authors — to improve their performance. “But it was incredibly cumbersome and expensive to run all the models in parallel,” Vinyals said. “We were intrigued with the idea of distilling that onto a single model.”

The researchers thought they might make progress by addressing a notable weak point in machine-learning algorithms: Wrong answers were all considered equally bad, regardless of how wrong they might be. In an image-classification model, for instance, “confusing a dog with a fox was penalized the same way as confusing a dog with a pizza,” Vinyals said. The researchers suspected that the ensemble models did contain information about which wrong answers were less bad than others. Perhaps a smaller “student” model could use the information from the large “teacher” model to more quickly grasp the categories it was supposed to sort pictures into. Hinton called this “dark knowledge,” invoking an analogy with cosmological dark matter.

After discussing this possibility with Hinton, Vinyals developed a way to get the large teacher model to pass more information about the image categories to a smaller student model. The key was homing in on “soft targets” in the teacher model — where it assigns probabilities to each possibility, rather than firm this-or-that answers. One model, for example, calculated that there was a 30% chance that an image showed a dog, 20% that it showed a cat, 5% that it showed a cow, and 0.5% that it showed a car. By using these probabilities, the teacher model effectively revealed to the student that dogs are quite similar to cats, not so different from cows, and quite distinct from cars. The researchers found that this information would help the student learn how to identify images of dogs, cats, cows and cars more efficiently. A big, complicated model could be reduced to a leaner one with barely any loss of accuracy.

Explosive Growth

The idea was not an immediate hit. The paper was rejected from a conference, and Vinyals, discouraged, turned to other topics. But distillation arrived at an important moment. Around this time, engineers were discovering that the more training data they fed into neural networks, the more effective those networks became. The size of models soon exploded, as did their capabilities, but the costs of running them climbed in step with their size.

Many researchers turned to distillation as a way to make smaller models. In 2018, for instance, Google researchers unveiled a powerful language model called BERT, which the company soon began using to help parse billions of web searches. But BERT was big and costly to run, so the next year, other developers distilled a smaller version sensibly named DistilBERT, which became widely used in business and research. Distillation gradually became ubiquitous, and it’s now offered as a service by companies such as Google, OpenAI, and Amazon. The original distillation paper, still published only on the arxiv.org preprint server, has now been cited more than 25,000 times.

Considering that the distillation requires access to the innards of the teacher model, it’s not possible for a third party to sneakily distill data from a closed-source model like OpenAI’s o1, as DeepSeek was thought to have done. That said, a student model could still learn quite a bit from a teacher model just through prompting the teacher with certain questions and using the answers to train its own models — an almost Socratic approach to distillation.

Meanwhile, other researchers continue to find new applications. In January, the NovaSky lab at the University of California, Berkeley, showed that distillation works well for training chain-of-thought reasoning models, which use multistep “thinking” to better answer complicated questions. The lab says its fully open-source Sky-T1 model cost less than $450 to train, and it achieved similar results to a much larger open-source model. “We were genuinely surprised by how well distillation worked in this setting,” said Dacheng Li, a Berkeley doctoral student and co-student lead of the NovaSky team. “Distillation is a fundamental technique in AI.”

Astronomers have captured a snapshot of the dawn of a new solar system.

Almost 1,400 light years away from Earth, HOPS-315 is a star at the very beginning of its life. Clouds of surrounding gas are collapsing into the star, powering the fusion reactions which will burn brightly for billions of years.

While this gas shroud normally stops anyone from peering at the growing solar system inside, there’s a gap in the cloud facing in Earth’s direction. By bringing together a telescope network called the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers were able to get front row seats for the formation of HOPS-315’s first planets.

The findings of their research, led by Professor Melissa McClure, have now been published in the journal Nature. She says that while developing planets have been seen before, they’ve never been found at such an early stage.

“We’ve always known that the first solid parts of planets, or ‘planetesimals’, must form further back in time at earlier stages of the protoplanetary disc,” Melissa explains. “Now, for the first time, we’ve identified the earliest moment when planet formation is initiated around a star other than our Sun.”

Co-author Professor Merel van ‘t Hoff describes the images taken by the telescopes as “a picture of the baby solar system”.

“We’re seeing a system that looks like our solar system did when it was just beginning to form,” adds Merel. “This system is one of the best that we know to actually probe some of the processes that happened in our solar system.”

Studying the start of the solar system

When it comes to our own solar system, most of the knowledge about its early years comes from studying meteorites known as chondrites. These space rocks are made of the same material that went into the first planets, but have remained relatively unmodified since. This provides scientists with a time capsule of the early solar system.

One of the most important materials these meteorites contain is known as calcium-aluminium-rich inclusions (CAIs).

The dating of CAIs has revealed that they’re over 4.5 billion years old. This makes them the oldest known solids in the solar system. Scientists think they formed from the clouds of gas that surrounded the early Sun, known as a protoplanetary disc.

As well as dating the solar system, these materials also reveal the conditions in which the planets formed.

CAIs only form in temperatures of at least 1,300 Kelvin, or just over 1,000°C. This extreme heat explains why planets closer to the Sun, like Earth and Mars, are full of rocks and metals, while those further out are made of lighter materials that quickly evaporated.

As more solids began to form, they started to clump together under their own gravity until they became planetesimals. As these bodies got bigger, their gravity became stronger, attracting more material and eventually leading to the formation of the planets we know today. The bits of rock and matter left over became asteroids.

But exactly how the planets formed has remained a mystery. To answer this, astronomers are looking to distant solar systems that are developing in a similar way to our own.

Finding the first solids

Searching for signs of CAIs forming is difficult, as it’s expected to only last for around 160,000 years – a blink of an eye in the life of a star.

To raise the chances of finding a star that’s starting to form its own system, researchers have been looking towards stellar nurseries. These giant clouds of gas are so dense that parts of them are collapsing in on themselves and producing vast numbers of stars.

Some of the closest nurseries to Earth are found in a region of our galaxy known as the Radcliffe Wave. This 9,000 light year long belt of gases contains many familiar stars and constellations, such as Orion and Taurus.

It’s within the molecular cloud of Orion B that scientists have spotted HOPS-315. This star is at an incredibly early stage of development, having formed probably within the last 150,000 to 200,000 years.

The star is so young that it’s still surrounded by a cloud of gases known as a protostellar envelope. Most of these gases will end up as part of HOPS-315, but a fraction will end up making the star’s protoplanetary disc which will then go on to form new planets.

By peering through a gap in the envelope, ALMA and the JWST were able to investigate the conditions in the developing disc. They detected the chemical signatures of gases like silicon monoxide as well as crystalline silicate minerals.

These materials only exist at high temperatures, conditions that are hot enough to also allow CAIs to form. This makes it likely that the first solids are already condensing around HOPS-315, and that the star’s first planetesimals have either already started forming or will shortly.

While there are still many questions about the early development of solar systems, this research shows that stars like HOPS-315 can provide the evidence astronomers are looking for.

Scientists use scanning tunnelling microscopy to understand how a material’s electronic or magnetic properties relate to its structure on the atomic scale. When using this technique, however, they can normally investigate only the uppermost atomic layer of a material. Prof Anika Schlenhoff and postdoctoral researcher Dr Maciej Bazarnik from the Institute of Physics at the University of Münster (Germany) have now succeeded for the first time in using a modified measurement method to image structural and magnetic properties that lie beneath the surface. The team investigated an ultra-thin layer of a magnetic material (iron) beneath a two-dimensional graphene layer.

In conventional scanning tunnelling microscopy, so-called electronic states on the sample surface are used for the measurement signal (the ‘tunnel current’ that flows between the probe tip and the sample). In the resonant measurement variant used by the team, however, states located in front of the surface were investigated. Seemingly contradictory, but known for some time, these special states can be used to investigate electronic charge transfer at buried interfaces inside the sample. As the researchers have now shown, these special states can be used to detect the local magnetic properties of an iron film covered by graphene. The physical reason for this is that the electronic states located above the surface penetrate beneath the graphene into the sample down to the magnetic iron layer and become magnetic themselves through interaction with the iron.

‘This opens up new possibilities for investigation,’ Anika Schlenhoff explains. ‘We can now use the same scanning tunnelling microscope to investigate the top layer of a layered system and a buried interfacial layer beneath it in terms of their structural, electronic and magnetic properties. Both layers can be analysed with a uniquely high-spatial resolution that extends down to the atomic scale.’

The team also showed that their method can be used to obtain information about the local position of the layers relative to each other. For example, the position of the carbon atoms of the graphene varies locally with respect to the underlying iron atoms due to different stacking sequences. ‘The differences in the vertical stacking could not previously be resolved for this material system using conventional scanning tunnelling microscopy,’ explains Maciej Bazarnik. As it now turns out, the states near the surface, which are used in resonant scanning tunnelling microscopy, are sensitive to the stacking sequence and thus allow these differences to be visualised.

One of the world’s most powerful instruments reveals interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS as it heads towards perihelion.

We’re getting better views of interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS, as it makes its speedy passage through the inner solar system. This week, astronomers at the Gemini North observatory located on Mauna Kea in Hawai’i turned the facility’s enormous 8.1-meter telescope on the object, with amazing results.

You can definitely see the dusty coma forming around the comet’s nucleus in the images as it approaches the inner solar system. The multi-colored hues of the images are thanks to Gemini’s Multi-Object Spectrograph (GMOS-N) which will probe 3I/ATLAS across infrared and visible wavelengths.

Comet 3I/ATLAS crossing the dense galactic plane. The colors are due to the separate filters used on the GMOS-N spectrograph instrument. Credit: NOIRLab/AURA/Gemini North/IfA University of Hawaii.

“3I/ATLAS is currently passing in front of the very dense star fields near the galactic center in Sagittarius,” astronomer Karen Meech (University of Hawai’i Institute for Astronomy) told Universe Today. This makes it very challenging to find windows of time where we can get a good observation of the interstellar object that is not contaminated by passing over stars.”

The resulting combined image of 3I/ATLAS, revealing the teardrop shaped coma, characteristic of a comet. Credit: NOIRLab/AURA/Gemini North/IfA University of Hawaii.

As is always the case in modern astronomy, observing time comes at a premium. “Gemini is a ‘queue scheduled’ telescope, meaning observers prepare the observing sequence and the staff at the telescope execute the observations based on priority, best match to observing conditions etc,” says Meech. “For a high priority observation, this ensures you get the data. Using telescopes in the classical mode where an astronomer is assigned a night might mean you lose the night because of bad weather or instrument problems. The Gemini staff were fantastic and really went above and beyond what is expected in order to ensure these observations were successful.”

Star trails over the Gemini North Observatory. Credit: International Gemini Observatory.

3I/ATLAS also seems to be a very red object, reminiscent of KBOs such as 486958 Arrokoth, one of the only KBOs seen up close during New Horizons’ 2019 flyby.

This effort will help answer the main question currently on astronomer’s minds: how big is 3I/ATLAS? Current size estimates for the nucleus span a range from just under a kilometer to over 20 kilometers across—definitely larger than the other two known interstellar objects: 1I/’Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov.

“All small bodies rotate, so we interleaved images in the blue filter in between all the other filters so that we could get accurate colors of the object,” says Meech. “The brightness we see through the filter depends on how reflective the surface is at that wavelength, and the area of the surface reflecting sunlight. If it is rotating and you don’t have the same filter repeated in between each observation, then you can’t tell what is a change because of the color area. These images showed that 3I/ATLAS is ‘red’—meaning it reflects red light more strongly than blue light. This is what we usually see for comets in our solar system. The ‘red’ color is due to organic compounds on the surface for solar system comets.”

Currently just under 4 Astronomical Units (AU) from the Sun, 3I/ATLAS will pass perihelion 1.356 AU from the Sun on October 29th. Closest Earth passage is set for December 19th, at 1.8 AU distant. Mars actually gets the best seat in the solar system, on the 0.2 AU pass on October 3rd. We recently wrote about observing prospects for amateur astronomers leading up to and after perihelion here.

Where is interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS headed—and how close will it come to Earth? ☄️Using the latest data from @NASAJPL, we mapped the path of this rare visitor with Ansys STK as it speeds through our solar system.Watch the full trajectory in the model below. 🌌 pic.twitter.com/p64YChCZdL— Ansys (@ANSYS) July 11, 2025

Discovered by the Deep Random Survey in Chile as part of the worldwide ATLAS (Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System) on the night of July 1st 2025, 3I/ATLAS has already displayed a ‘personality’ of its own. The comet skims our ecliptic like a stone skipping water, and seems to be the first ever denizen of the thick galactic disk seen up close.

This source means that 3I/ATLAS may be a very old object indeed, perhaps pre-dating our own solar system by billions of years.

“At the moment, with what we know about 3I/ATLAS it is not an unusual comet,” astronomer “Rosemary Dorsey (University of Helsinki) told Universe Today. “3I is larger than an average comet, but it is not usually large—one of the largest comets, C/2014 UN271, has been measured with a diameter of ~100 kilometers! It is also common for comets to have very low activity at the current distance of 3I, as the activity of most comets is due to water ice sublimating near 3-4 AU from the Sun. We are still waiting to see how 3I will react when it reaches this distance to better put it into context with our solar system comets.”

More observations of Comet 3I/ATLAS are in store using both ground- and space-assets, in what promises to be a frenzied next few months of activity.

“We will be getting more images to see how the comet is brightening, and see if there is any color change,” says Meech. “Another colleague at IfA (Hawaii’s Institute for Astronomy) will be triggering his program to get a good spectrum—to complement the spectrum we got at Gemini South, to confirm some features we saw, and to see if there are changes as the comet becomes more active.”

Next on deck is the Hubble Space Telescope, which has scheduled time to image 3I/ATLAS on July 21st. It’s highly likely that JWST and Vera Rubin will also get their turn as well.

Astronomer Bryce Bolin also captured the comet from Apache Point, New Mexico in an effort to pin down the colors and spectrum of the nucleus.

The +17th magnitude comet is currently tricky to pick out as it crosses the star rich fields of Ophiuchus, but that’s about to change. This weekend, 3I/ATLAS threads its way between the globular clusters NGC 6356 and Messier 9, making for a fine photographic opportunity.

Expect more great shots of Comet 3I/ATLAS to come!

A study led by a scientist at the University of California San Diego offers new warnings on the dangers of human interactions with wildlife.

Assistant Professor Shermin de Silva of the School of Biological Sciences studies endangered Asian elephants and has reported on their shrinking habitats, a downturn that has resulted in territorial conflicts between people and elephants.

Along with her study coauthors, de Silva now provides fresh evidence in the journal Ecological Solutions and Evidence on the serious consequences of humans supplying food to wild animals. The report indicates that such provisioning can lead wildlife to become habituated to people, causing the animals to become bolder and more prone to causing problems. Even for those who live in areas without native elephant populations, the new study provides cautionary information about interactions with any wildlife species living among us.

Wild elephants are a prime attraction in Asia, with Sri Lanka and India featuring some of the world’s last abundant populations of Asian elephants.

In Sri Lanka, de Silva studied 18 years of elephant-tourist interactions at Udawalawe National Park. She found that the elephants congregating near tourists at the park’s southern boundary have developed “begging” behavior and have become habituated to sugary foods, sometimes breaking through fences to continue being fed. As a result of elephants being drawn to the fence, several people have been killed or injured, and at least three elephants have been killed, while others have ingested plastic food bags and other contaminants. Such close human-wildlife encounters, including tourists feeding animals from sightseeing vehicles, also increases the risk of disease transmission to animals.

In India’s Sigur region, study coauthors Priya Davidar and Jean-Philippe Puyravaud of the Sigur Nature Trust observed feeding interactions with 11 male Asian elephants, four of which died from suspected human causes. One elephant was successfully rehabilitated and returned to natural foraging behavior.

“Many people, especially foreign tourists, think Asian elephants are tame and docile, like domestic pets,” said de Silva, a faculty member in the Department of Ecology, Behavior and Evolution and founder of the non-profit conservation organization Trunks & Leaves. “They don’t realize these are formidable wild animals and try to get too close in order to take photographs or selfies, which can end badly for both parties.”

Of the 800 to 1,200 elephants estimated living in Udawalawe National Park, the study found that 66 male elephants, or nine to 15% of the local male population of Asian elephants, were observed begging for food. Some elephants, including a popular male named Rambo, became local celebrities as they solicited food from tourists over several years.

“Food-conditioned animals can become dangerous, resulting in the injury and death of wildlife, people or both,” the researchers note in their paper. “These negative impacts counteract potential benefits.”

Since wild elephant feeding cannot be adequately regulated as an ongoing activity, the authors of the study recommend that feeding bans should be strictly enforced.

The researchers recognize that tourists are for the most part acting with good intentions, like people in many areas around the world who feed or leave food for wild animals in their regions. They can act from a motivation that they are helping friends in nature and take gratification from such interactions. “But this encourages wild animals to seek food from people, attracting them to areas that can put themselves or people at risk,” said de Silva. “It can be a conduit for disease transfer between species. Such feeding can also cause animals to lose their ability to forage for themselves if the behavior becomes prevalent, especially with young animals.”

Such interactions, de Silva says, can change animals’ movement patterns and possibly force them to lose knowledge of natural food sources if they become too dependent on handouts.

With rare exceptions, people should avoid feeding wild animals, de Silva urges, and encourages people to engage in responsible tourism.

GA, UNITED STATES, July 18, 2025 /EINPresswire.com/ — This study systematically investigates the cytotoxicity evolution of protonated carbon nitride toward red blood cells and elucidates its underlying mechanisms, revealing that surface protonation amplifies carbon nitride nanosheet-induced phospholipid extraction and enhances cytotoxicity.

Graphitic carbon nitride (g-C3N4), an engineered carbon nanomaterial with tunable electronic structure, chemical stability, and biocompatibility, has promising applications in photocatalytic therapy, targeted drug delivery, and pollutant degradation. However, its transformations in biological and environmental systems (e.g., chemical protonation) can alter surface chemistry, charge distribution, and nanoscale topology, thereby affecting its biological interactions and toxicity.

In a study published in the KeAi journal Environmental Chemistry and Ecotoxicology, a group of researchers from the Guangdong University of Technology, China, investigated the cytotoxicity evolution of protonated carbon nitride (p-C3N4) toward red blood cells and elucidated its underlying mechanisms.

“Hemolysis assays showed that p-C3N4 exhibits enhanced phospholipid membrane-rupturing capabilities compared to pristine g-C3N4, with no significant lipid peroxidation detected,” shares lead and co-corresponding author Yiping Feng. “Surface characterization revealed that protonation reduces the net negative charge of carbon nitride, increasing its affinity with phospholipid membranes.”

Through molecular docking simulations, the researchers observed that interactions between p-C3N4 and phospholipid molecules were governed by electrostatic and hydrophobic forces, as well as hydrogen bonding with oxygen-containing functional groups.

“Molecular dynamics simulations further revealed that larger oxygen-bearing macropores on p-C3N4 allow for tight and specific binding with phospholipid headgroups, facilitating efficient lipid extraction and intensifying membrane disruption,” adds Feng.

The team’s findings provide critical insights into the cytotoxic changes that carbon nitride materials may undergo during transformations. They also highlight opportunities to mitigate associated risks or use surface protonation for enhanced functionality in carbon nitride-based technologies.

References
DOI
10.1016/j.enceco.2025.05.025

Original Source URL
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enceco.2025.05.025

Funding information
This study was supported by the Basic Science Center Project of the Natural Science Foundation of China (52388101), the Program for Guangdong Introducing Innovative and Entrepreneurial Teams (2019ZT08L213), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (21707019), the Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province (2021A1515010019), and the Research Fund Program of Guangdong Provincial Engineering Research Center of Intelligent Low-Carbon Pollution Prevention and Digital Technology/SCNU (NAN’AN) Green and Low-Carbon Innovation Center (2024K04).

Lucy Wang
BioDesign Research
email us here

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Four crew members are preparing to launch to the International Space Station as part of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-11 mission to perform research, technology demonstrations, and maintenance activities aboard the orbiting laboratory.

During the mission, Crew-11 also will contribute to NASA’s Artemis campaign by simulating Moon landing scenarios that astronauts may encounter near the lunar South Pole, showing how the space station helps prepare crews for deep space human exploration. The simulations will be performed before, during, and after their mission using handheld controllers and multiple screens to identify how changes in gravity affect spatial awareness and astronauts’ ability to pilot spacecraft, like a lunar lander.

NASA astronauts Zena Cardman and Mike Fincke, JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Kimiya Yui, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Platonov will lift off no earlier than 12:09 p.m. EDT on Thursday, July 31, from Launch Complex 39A at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on a long-duration mission. The cadre will fly aboard a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft, named Endeavour, which previously flew NASA’s SpaceX Demo-2, Crew-2, Crew-6, and Crew-8 missions, as well as private astronaut mission Axiom Mission 1.

The flight is the 11th crew rotation mission with SpaceX to the space station as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. Overall, the Crew-11 mission is the 16th crewed Dragon flight to the space station, including Demo-2 in 2020 and 11 operational crew rotations for NASA, as well as four private astronaut missions.

As support teams progress through Dragon preflight milestones for Crew-11, they also are preparing a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket booster for its third flight. Once all rocket and spacecraft system checkouts are complete and all components are certified for flight, teams will mate Dragon to Falcon 9 in SpaceX’s hangar at the launch site. The integrated spacecraft and rocket will then be rolled to the pad and raised vertically for the crew’s dry dress rehearsal and an integrated static fire test before launch.

Selected as a NASA astronaut in 2017, Cardman will conduct her first spaceflight. The Williamsburg, Virginia, native holds a bachelor’s degree in biology and a master’s degree in marine sciences from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. At the time of selection, she was pursuing a doctorate in geosciences. Cardman’s geobiology and geochemical cycling research focused on subsurface environments, from caves to deep sea sediments. Since completing initial training, Cardman has supported real-time station operations and lunar surface exploration planning. Follow @zenanaut on X and @zenanaut on Instagram.

This mission will be Fincke’s fourth trip to the space station, having logged 382 days in space and nine spacewalks during Expedition 9 in 2004, Expedition 18 in 2008, and STS-134 in 2011, the final flight of space shuttle Endeavour. Throughout the past decade, Fincke has applied his expertise to NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, advancing the development and testing of Dragon and Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft toward operational certification. The Emsworth, Pennsylvania, native is a graduate of the United States Air Force Test Pilot School and holds bachelors’ degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, in both aeronautics and astronautics, as well as Earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences. He also has a master’s degree in aeronautics and astronautics from Stanford University in California. Fincke is a retired U.S. Air Force colonel with more than 2,000 flight hours in over 30 different aircraft. Follow @AstroIronMike on X and Instagram.

With 142 days in space, this mission will be Yui’s second trip to the space station. After his selection as a JAXA astronaut in 2009, Yui flew as a flight engineer for Expedition 44/45 and became the first Japanese astronaut to capture JAXA’s H-II Transfer Vehicle using the station’s robotic arm. In addition to constructing a new experimental environment aboard Kibo, he conducted a total of 21 experiments for JAXA. In November 2016, Yui was assigned as chief of the JAXA Astronaut Group. He graduated from the School of Science and Engineering at the National Defense Academy of Japan in 1992. He later joined the Air Self-Defense Force at the Japan Defense Agency (currently the Ministry of Defense). In 2008, Yui joined the Air Staff Office at the Ministry of Defense as a lieutenant colonel. Follow @astro_kimiya on X.

The mission will be Platonov’s first spaceflight. Before his selection as a cosmonaut in 2018, Platonov earned a degree in engineering from Krasnodar Air Force Academy in aircraft operations and air traffic management. He also earned a bachelor’s degree in state and municipal management in 2016 from the Far Eastern Federal University in Vladivostok, Russia. Assigned as a test cosmonaut in 2021, he has experience in piloting aircraft, zero gravity training, scuba diving, and wilderness survival.

Following liftoff, Falcon 9 will accelerate Dragon to approximately 17,500 mph. Once in orbit, the crew, NASA, and SpaceX mission control will monitor a series of maneuvers that will guide Dragon to the forward-facing port of the station’s Harmony module. The spacecraft is designed to dock autonomously, but the crew can pilot it manually, if necessary.

After docking, Crew-11 will be welcomed aboard the station by the seven-member Expedition 73 crew, before conducting a short handover period on research and maintenance activities with the departing Crew-10 crew members. Then, NASA astronauts Anne McClain, Nichole Ayers, JAXA astronaut Takuya Onishi, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov will undock from the space station and return to Earth. Ahead of Crew-10’s return, mission teams will review weather conditions at the splashdown sites off the coast of California before departure from the station.

Cardman, Fincke, and Yui will conduct scientific research to prepare for human exploration beyond low Earth orbit and benefit humanity on Earth. Participating crew members will simulate lunar landings, test strategies to safeguard vision, and advance other human spaceflight studies led by NASA’s Human Research Program. The crew also will study plant cell division and microgravity’s effects on bacteria-killing viruses, as well as perform experiments to produce a higher volume of human stem cells and generate on-demand nutrients.

While aboard the orbiting laboratory, Crew-11 will welcome a Soyuz spacecraft in November with three new crew members, including NASA astronaut Chris Williams.  They also will bid farewell to the Soyuz carrying NASA astronaut Jonny Kim. The crew also is expected to see the arrival of the Dragon, Roscosmos Progress spacecraft, and Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus spacecraft to resupply the station.

NASA’s SpaceX Crew-11 mission will be aboard the International Space Station on Nov. 2, when the orbiting laboratory surpasses 25 years of a continuous human presence. Since the first crew expedition arrived, the space station has enabled more than 4,000 groundbreaking experiments in the unique microgravity environment, while becoming a springboard for building a low Earth orbit economy and preparing for NASA’s future exploration of the Moon and Mars.

Learn more about the space station, its research, and crew, at:

https://www.nasa.gov/station

Scientists and astronomers are racing to study only the third-ever known interstellar visitor to the solar system, but with a powerful new observatory coming online, these enigmatic objects may soon become routine discoveries.

A comet, now known as 3I/ATLAS, with 3I short for “third interstellar,” sparked immediate excitement on July 1 when it was detected by the Deep Random Survey remote telescope in Chile, exhibiting a hyperbolic and highly eccentric orbit.