I’ve been far too busy this week to come up with a reasonable article to review and post. So, for something fun on Friday, here are some awesome classic NASA concept art pieces. Isn’t it crazy how amazing space concept art used to be?
The Moon is about to get busier, and a group of heritage experts just got together in Pisa, Italy to talk about keeping our favorite night-sky object from looking like a junkyard. The International Scientific Committee on Aerospace Heritage (ISCAH) convened in September to develop guidelines for how spacecraft should be deorbited onto the lunar surface, which is a topic made urgent by the crash of a SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage into the Moon last August. As lunar traffic ramps up, controlled crash-landings of retired orbiters and spent rocket stages are becoming an attractive end-of-mission disposal strategy, and that’s precisely what worries the committee.
For amateur astronomers, the concern is very real: every impact leaves a visible scar. There have already been 51 hard spacecraft impacts on the Moon (including nine rocket bodies and 19 lunar orbiters), each one churning up sticky, abrasive dust and creating new craters that alter the surface’s appearance. Because the Moon has no atmosphere to erase these marks, they persist essentially forever. As archaeologist Alice Gorman put it, we’ve hit “an inflection point where spacecraft craters aren’t just new archaeological sites, they’re an environmental hazard that may cause irreversible damage.” For those of us who enjoy sketching the lunar surface or tracking subtle albedo changes through our scopes, a growing constellation of fresh impact marks and dust plumes could gradually change the look of familiar features we’ve observed for decades.
The good news is that the ISCAH group, working alongside the World Monuments Fund, plans to move into a stakeholder dialogue phase in the coming months and reaching out to space agencies, private companies, heritage experts, and even communities with cultural or spiritual ties to the Moon. The resulting guidelines are slated for presentation at the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space in 2027, with the goal of eventually becoming internationally recognized standards of behavior. The ultimate aim, in the words of committee member Forassiepi, is a lunar future that is sustainable not just operationally, but also in preserving “the earliest traces of human presence in the history of space” and, as any backyard observer would agree, the quiet, pockmarked beauty of the Moon itself.
In a recent sit-down with NewsNation’s Blake Burman, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman struck a tone that should make any of us who’ve spent late nights staring at the night sky feel a little less alone in our conviction. He was asked point-blank whether he thinks any of the UAP footage out there could be extraterrestrial, and his answer was a resounding “be open-minded.” He even compared the current wave of sightings to a potential Sputnik Moment, which is that jolt of realization that we’re not the only ones building things up there. His parting line was the one that stuck with me: “If it’s aliens, I think NASA should have a seat at the table in this, for sure.” For an agency chief to frame the question that way, rather than dismiss it, is genuinely refreshing.
Where Isaacman hedges a bit is in his lean toward more prosaic explanations such as natural phenomena or next-gen stealth tech being tested near military ranges. That’s the cautious, “let the data speak” scientist in him talking, and fair enough. But it’s worth noting he’s also confirmed that NASA has captured imagery of objects the agency still can’t explain, and that the agency has been actively participating in the Trump administration’s PURSUE declassification effort. So while he won’t jump to the “aliens” conclusion just yet, he’s absolutely not closing the door. For those of us who’ve been telling people for decades that the answer is out there, even a measured “I lean this way but I’m not ruling anything out” from the head of NASA is a win.
The paragraph that really got me was the closer. Isaacman pointed out that right here in our own backyard including Enceladus with its subsurface ocean, Europa with its complex chemistry, so we can’t even rule out life. Then he zoomed out: billions of stars in the Milky Way, two trillion other galaxies beyond that. “It’s why NASA’s mission is so important,” he said. I think that’s the right framing. Whether the UAP files ultimately point to classified tech or something far stranger, the underlying question: Are we alone?“, is the one that makes all of this matter. And it’s a good sign that the person running the agency that’s best positioned to answer it is treating that question with the seriousness it deserves.
The Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) partnership has turned down Spain’s bid to plant the long-stalled giant on La Palma, ending a last-ditch attempt to move the project from Hawaii’s Mauna Kea to the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory. After more than a decade of protests and permitting delays on the preferred Hawaiian summit, Spain put a package of up to €1 billion on the table; roughly €400 million from its technology agency plus loans involving the European Investment Bank and Spain’s official credit institute; if the consortium would commit to the Canary Islands site. The TMT International Observatory replied that its members (California, Caltech, Canada, India, and Japan) could not reach the consensus needed to accept the offer. The letter praised Spain’s “extraordinary” commitment and the scientific quality of the Roque, but construction there will not start in the near term.
For backyard observers, the news is a reminder of how hard it has become to finish the next generation of 30-meter-class telescopes. TMT was meant to give the Northern Hemisphere a counterpart to the southern giants now rising in Chile, opening deeper views of exoplanets, the first galaxies, and the faint outer solar system. La Palma already hosts the 10.4-meter Gran Telescopio Canarias and a dense cluster of other instruments under some of Europe’s darkest, steadiest skies; adding TMT would have made the island a true northern flagship. Instead, the project remains tied to Mauna Kea, where a new management authority is still working through community and legal issues, and some insiders now openly wonder whether TMT will be built at all. The Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias says it will keep developing the Roque and look for other large facilities.
For us amateurs who follow big-telescope news the way others follow sports, the story is bittersweet: another chapter closed, the universe still waiting for that 30-meter mirror to open.
Delta Cephei, the namesake of the Cepheid variables, sits in a compact triangle at the southeastern corner of Cepheus’s house-shaped pattern. From mid-northern latitudes it is circumpolar, so it never sets, but it is most comfortable to observe on autumn and winter evenings when the constellation stands high in the north. Start with Cassiopeia’s familiar W (or M) and hop toward the “roof” of the house, or use the Big Dipper’s pointers through Polaris and continue another fist-width onward. Once you have the little triangle, Delta is the peak; Zeta Cephei (about magnitude 3.6) and Epsilon Cephei (about 4.2) form the base and serve as ready-made comparison stars. A planetarium app on night mode or a simple printed chart is enough to lock the field the first time.
The star itself pulses from roughly magnitude 3.5 at brightest to 4.4 at faintest every 5.366 days, rising quickly over about a day and a half and then fading more slowly. Under reasonably dark skies the change is obvious to the unaided eye if you glance back and forth between Delta and its two neighbors; from suburban sites a pair of 7×50 or 8×40 binoculars makes the estimates easier and more repeatable. Note the date and time to the nearest quarter-hour, decide whether Delta looks equal to, halfway between, or closer to one comparison star, and log the estimate. Repeating the same comparison on every clear night for two or three weeks quickly reveals the classic sawtooth light curve and turns a casual look into a real measurement.
A small telescope adds a second treat: Delta is a pretty double, a golden-yellow primary with a pale blue-white companion about 41 arcseconds to the south-southwest. Keep magnifications modest so both stars stay in the same field, and remember that moonlight or thin haze will flatten the contrast of the variable itself. The same patch of sky also rewards a slow sweep for nearby clusters and nebulae, so once you have made your magnitude estimate you can linger. Consistency matters more than perfect conditions; a few minutes of careful comparison on successive nights will teach you more about this historic star than a single long session ever could.
Astronomers have confirmed the first known microblazar in the Milky Way: a stellar-mass black hole whose relativistic jet happens to be pointed almost directly at Earth. The system, catalogued as IRAS 18293-0941 and lying only about 12,000 light-years away, consists of a black hole and a companion star that completes an orbit every 11.38 days. Material stripped from the star forms an accretion disk that powers two jets racing outward at three-quarters the speed of light. One of those jets is aimed toward us; the opposite jet only becomes visible because it slams into a nearby molecular cloud, carving a bubble and heating gas until it glows.
The object had been sitting in infrared catalogues for decades, hidden behind thick dust that rendered it invisible in ordinary optical images. High-resolution radio observations with the European VLBI Network, combined with the precise stellar position from Gaia, finally pinned the jet to the binary itself rather than to some distant background galaxy. Where the receding jet strikes the cloud, particles appear to be accelerated to energies that may reach the petaelectronvolt range, making this modest stellar system one of the galaxy’s more efficient natural particle accelerators.
The discovery fulfills a theoretical prediction that has been on the books for thirty years. Researchers now plan to watch the jet evolve and to hunt for additional microblazars, which could turn out to play a quiet but important role in how galaxies process energy and cosmic rays. Rest easy, though: at this distance the beam poses no threat to Earth. It is simply a beautifully aligned laboratory sitting in our own backyard.
Read More: https://earthsky.org/space/black-hole-jet-aimed-at-us-galaxy-microblazar/
Phobos, the inner moon of Mars, remains one of the Solar System’s more stubborn puzzles. Only about 22 kilometers across and racing around the planet every 7 hours and 39 minutes, it could be either a captured asteroid or the leftover debris from a giant impact that once struck the Red Planet. Researchers now argue that the answer may lie inside the moon itself; specifically beneath Stickney, the 9-kilometer crater that dominates one face of Phobos.
Stickney is more than a scar. If Phobos formed from Martian impact debris, the crater may date to roughly 4.2 billion years ago; if the moon was captured, the impact could be closer to 2.6 billion years old. Modeling presented at the European Geosciences Union and published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society suggests the collision may have melted and compressed rock beneath the crater floor, leaving a denser mass that would slightly alter Phobos’s gravity field, moments of inertia, and tiny wobble, or libration. Detecting that signature would constrain how mass is arranged inside the moon.
That interior is thought to be porous, possibly ice-bearing, and loosely bound; more like a rubble-pile asteroid than a solid rock. Such a “sponge-like” structure might explain how so small a body survived an impact that ought to have shattered it. Reconciling Phobos’s irregular shape, low density, spectral properties, and decaying orbit in a single geophysical model remains difficult, because the moon sits so close to Mars that the planet’s gravity overwhelms Phobos’s own weak field.
Time is limited. Phobos is slowly spiraling inward and will eventually break apart or strike Mars. Japan’s Martian Moons Exploration (MMX) mission, targeted for launch later in 2026, is designed to fly in a challenging quasi-orbit around the moon, collect surface samples with a core drill and a NASA-contributed pneumatic sampler, and return them to Earth by about 2031. Those measurements and rocks should finally show whether Stickney hides the compressed fingerprint of Phobos’s origin.
Read More: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/09/260919031040.htm
JWST observations of galaxies less than a billion years after the Big Bang revealed unexpectedly massive black-hole “seeds,” which is hard to explain if those objects had to grow from ordinary stellar-mass remnants. That tension has revived the direct-collapse black hole (DCBH) picture: a massive, metal-poor gas cloud in the center of an early galaxy collapses in one shot into a heavy seed rather than assembling through a long chain of mergers.
An international team led by Alessandro Trinca used dark-matter merger trees from high-resolution N-body simulations, then fed those histories into the Cosmic Archaeology Tool to track which halos could actually form DCBHs. The models show that the most favorable sites are cosmic over-densities—regions already packed with gas, dust, and merging dark-matter clumps. Direct collapse can begin as early as about 500 million years after the Big Bang and continues until metal enrichment from the first supernovae shuts the channel down a few hundred million years later.
Those results give observers a concrete target: the descendants of DCBHs should turn up as companion AGN near bright quasars at redshift ~7. Finding a large population of such neighbors in future JWST surveys would be strong evidence that the first supermassive black holes grew in clustered, over-dense environments rather than in isolation.
Much has been written to hype colonization of the Moon, Mars, and other bodies in our solar system. But there are still many challenges faced by potential colonists in such a future. Chief among those concerns it that of fuel. We can carry much of the fuel we need to get to these places from Earth, but what happens when we get there? Outposts will need ways to synthesize their own fuel in order to return to Earth or to maintain their equipment and habitats. Enter a team at MIT that is looking to the Martian atmosphere itself for answers.
MIT Ph.D. Candidate Lanie McKinney is working on a device that would pull gases from Mars’ heavy atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide into oxygen and carbon monoxide to support life support systems and propellant systems.
According to Universe Today, McKinney and a team of cross-discipline researchers are examining ways that a unique device called the Nanosecond Repetitively Pulsed Dielectric Barrier Discharge (NRP-DBD) that uses an oxygen-selective membrane to extract oxygen rapidly from carbon dioxide. While the proof-of-concept work seems promising, there are still some efforts that need to be undertaken to address concerns after oxygen conversion.
An interesting point that is not addressed in the article is how this kind of technology could be utilized on our own planet. If carbon dioxide is seen as such a dangerous gas in our own atmosphere, it seems like this would be an exceptional option for creating pollution-reductant fuels…
Read More: https://www.universetoday.com/articles/mit-research-could-lead-to-refueling-depots-on-mars
Today is International Observe the Moon Day, which is a project that began in 2010 to bring people together to learn more about our planet’s natural satellite. Since the program began in 2010, people around the world have participated through lunar observations, hands-on activities, artwork, music, and more.
NASA keeps a collection of events on their website and there are many amateur astronomy clubs across the world that are always ready to jump at an opportunity to show off their telescopes, so be sure to look them up!
Find out more on NASA’s website: https://science.nasa.gov/moon/observe-the-moon-night/
