It’s like something out of a Hollywood blockbuster: an astronaut looks out the window and suddenly notices a thin crack running across the glass, separating him from the deadly vacuum by just a few centimeters. But what happened to the crew of the Chinese Shenzhou-20 mission last November was not a movie, but a harsh reality that nearly led to a catastrophe in orbit.

Commander Chen Dong was the first to notice the danger. What at first appeared to him to be ordinary trash or a leaf stuck to the glass turned out to be much more sinister. A triangular mark was clearly visible on the inner surface of the window — a crack left by a collision with an unknown object.

“I went out to inspect it, and my eye immediately noticed this anomaly,” recalled the commander. In an instant, realization came with a chill of fear: their station had been attacked by a piece of space debris. Scientists still do not know its origin, but they assume that the deadly guest was no larger than a millimeter. This proved sufficient to break through the spacecraft’s strong defenses.

Don’t panic

Despite the dramatic nature of the situation, there was no panic on board. Taikonaut Wang Jie, who was responsible for safety, handled the incident with professional calm. He explained that the design of the porthole was not just simple glass, but a complex engineering system.

“The outer layer is just a protective screen, a kind of ‘shield’. The main pressure is held by two inner sealed layers,” he reassured the audience. For detailed analysis, the astronauts used a special microscope that looked like a pen. They were shocked by what they saw: a network of cracks, some relatively long, others shorter, but the most dangerous thing was that some of them went right through the material.

Rescue operation

Unlike in movies, where everything is decided in seconds, the real drama unfolded over several days. However, the consequences could have been catastrophic. The damaged Shenzhou-20 could no longer be used to return the crew home. The risk of depressurization during descent was too great.

The Chinese flight control center quickly developed a rescue plan. The crew of Shenzhou-20 was forced to abandon their spacecraft and temporarily “move” to the station. They returned home in the Shenzhou-21 capsule, which was originally intended for their replacements. This created a new problem: the new crew was left in orbit without a vehicle.

The situation was saved by the fact that the empty emergency Shenzhou-20 was later successfully undocked and returned to Earth in automatic mode.

Warning for the future

This incident is not just a story about successfully avoiding disaster. This is a stern warning to all those who are exploring near-Earth space today. Our orbit has turned into a crowded garbage dump, where thousands of objects are hurtling around at breakneck speed.

We will never know what exactly hit Shenzhou-20 — a microscopic fragment of an old rocket or paint from another satellite. But scientists unanimously warn that a chain reaction of collisions (Kessler syndrome) could render space unsuitable for flights for decades.

Earlier, we explained what kind of event could destroy the entire orbital infrastructure in 2.8 days.

• According to Live Science

K2-18b is a so-called Habitable Zone planet located 124 light-years away from us. In terms of mass, the planet is somewhere between Earth and a small gas giant. Researchers are interested in whether extraterrestrial life could exist on it.

Primary goal for SETI

If you have been following exoplanet research over the past few years, you have probably heard of K2-18b. Located 124 light-years away in the constellation Leo, it has attracted a lot of attention because it is right in the habitable zone of its red dwarf star, and measurements from the James Webb Space Telescope show that its atmosphere is rich in carbon dioxide and methane. It is one of the leading candidates for the title of “hydrogen world” — a world where a dense atmosphere rich in hydrogen covers a global ocean of liquid water.

This is such an interesting target for researchers from the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project that they have directed two of the world’s most powerful radio telescopes to observe the K2-18b system. A recent article available on the arXiv preprint server shows that, despite millions of potential matches, this planet is unlikely to be sending out artificial narrowband radio signals equivalent to our level of technology.

Listening with radio telescopes

To collect the data needed for processing, both the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico and the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa were used. These are the two most powerful radio telescopes on the planet, and their coordination within the observation campaign is an extremely rare occurrence.

But physical equipment was not the only important factor for this work. The “data transfer channel,” as astronomers call the software filters and logic applied after data collection, is no less important, especially in radio astronomy. Signals from Earth are the source of the vast majority of radio signals received by these telescopes, and modern filtering algorithms, such as the Commensal Open-Source Multi-Mode Interferometer Cluster system used by the VLA, and the Breakthrough Listen User Supplied Equipment (BLUSE) system used by MeerKAT, are important elements of any modern radio astronomy program.

Radio signal filtering system

However, the logic behind such filtering remains the responsibility of the people involved in the process, and the article describes five different restrictions they impose on the data for selecting potential alien technosignatures. The first step was to mask radio frequency interference — essentially, they removed all data from signals falling within frequency ranges known to be heavily contaminated by terrestrial interference. If aliens communicated through these channels, we would have to use some other method — such as a radio telescope on the far side of the Moon — to hear them.

Doppler effects, such as the changing sound of an ambulance siren as it approaches or passes you, are even more noticeable when the signal travels between planets. Any signal with virtually no Doppler effect was immediately rejected, as it could only have originated from Earth. Perhaps the most controversial logical filtering choice was to exclude all signals with a signal-to-noise ratio of less than 10 or greater than 100. Although this allowed for the exclusion of extremely weak false positives, as well as strong instrumental data artifacts typically observed in only one antenna, it could also exclude.

Another filtering technique is the use of multi-beam analysis. In this case, the telescopes formed coherent beams across the sky, one of which was directed directly at K2-18b, and the other at a different location. In such cases, the signal coming from the exoplanet would only appear in the beam directed directly at it, while terrestrial interference penetrates several beams simultaneously. The final check, which was not necessary due to the timing of the study, is transit filtering. Any signal coming from K2-18b should disappear when the planet passes in front of its parent star, but since no such “secondary transit” occurred during the observation, filtering was not necessary.

Positive test result in any case

In short, despite millions of potential signals throughout the observation period, none of them passed these filters. No unambiguous technosignatures were detected in the narrowband radio spectrum from K2-18b. Although this may seem disappointing, it is precisely this kind of thing that science needs in order to progress. By carefully scanning the planet and finding nothing, they can establish the “upper limits” of the transmitter’s power from this system — in terms of power, it would be equivalent to the destroyed Arecibo radar in Puerto Rico. If there is civilization there, it certainly does not scream at us from anything greater than this level of radio telescope.

However, perhaps the most important result is the confirmation of the concept of their automated filtering system. Processing millions of signals detected by two telescopes manually would be virtually impossible. So, when even larger radio telescopes such as the Square Kilometer Array appear, these technologies will be ready to help other research projects make sense of the mass of data collected. Although planet K2-18b may be quiet today, we will continue to improve our ability to listen if it ever begins to communicate with us.

• According to phys.org

On the night of February 24-25, US President Donald Trump made history by giving the longest speech on the state of the nation — it lasted 107 minutes. The main topics were economic successes, criticism of the Democrats, and the fight against illegal immigration. However, amid the political statements, an event worthy of special attention has been overlooked: the country is preparing to send a human into deep space for the first time since the legendary Apollo program. 

The most ironic thing is that the main characters of the upcoming space breakthrough went unnoticed, even though they were sitting in the front row. The astronauts of the Artemis II mission — Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch from NASA, and Jeremy Hansen from the Canadian Space Agency — were guests of honor of the Speaker of the House of Representatives. These four brave souls are about to embark on a journey to the Moon that no human being has undertaken in more than fifty years.

Their 10-day flight will be more than just a symbolic gesture. This will be the farthest human expedition in the history of space exploration, taking the Orion spacecraft into orbit around our natural satellite.

The Trump administration’s vision

The Artemis II mission is intended to lay the foundation for a “golden age of American space leadership” — a phrase that the Trump administration uses quite often. However, the president limited himself to brief references to Apollo’s glorious past and boastful statements about the creation of the US Space Force, proudly calling it “his brainchild.”

However, the significance of Artemis II extends far beyond political ambitions. This is a critically important test phase: for the first time, the super-heavy Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and the Orion spacecraft will be tested with a crew on board. The success of the mission should confirm the US’s ability not only to return to the Moon, but also to make long-term plans for expeditions to Mars.

Space race gains momentum

The importance of the program is reinforced by the international context. China is actively developing its own manned lunar program, adding an element of healthy competition and urgency to American efforts. Maintaining NASA’s technological supremacy is not only a matter of prestige, but also of national security and scientific leadership.

However, despite its historical context and geopolitical significance, the mission faces an unexpected enemy — public indifference. Even among space enthusiasts, interest is beginning to wane due to technical problems. It was recently announced that SLS and Orion are returning to the hangar, postponing the likely launch until at least April.

A missed opportunity to unite the nation

The problem of lack of attention is not just a matter of NASA’s “public relations.” Without broad public support, multi-billion-dollar space programs become vulnerable targets for budget cuts. Trump had a unique opportunity to draw the attention of a 300 million-strong audience to the titanic feat that his compatriots are preparing to accomplish for the first time in half a century. He could present the astronauts sitting in the hall and explain the significance of their mission for the future of humanity.

Instead, time was spent on political tirades. By failing to seize this opportunity, the president did more than simply ignore an important event — he dealt a blow to his own space policy, depriving it of potential public support at a time when it needs it most.

Earlier, we reported on whether Trump is hiding something about aliens.

• According to Gizmodo

The Curiosity rover has studied a network of Martian “webs” — structures formed by ancient underground water. This raises the question once again of whether life could have existed on the Red Planet.

One of the distinctive features of Mars are geological formations called “boxworks,” which look like giant spider webs from space. They are low ridges stretching for many kilometers, with heights ranging from 1 to 2 meters, with sandy depressions between them.

To explain their shape, scientists have hypothesized that underground water once flowed through large cracks in the bedrock, leaving minerals behind. These minerals then reinforced the areas that became ridges, while other areas that did not have mineral reinforcement were eroded over time.

Martian “highway”

However, until recently, this was only a hypothesis. Although boxwork ridges also exist on Earth, they rarely exceed a few centimeters in height and are usually found in caves or dry sandy environments. To reveal the nature of these formations, it was necessary to examine them closely.

The Curiosity rover was used to solve this problem, which proved to be a real challenge for the team controlling it. They needed to plan the route for the 900-kilogram rover so that it could travel along the tops of ridges whose width was not much greater than the rover’s own width. 

“It almost feels like a highway we can drive on. But then we have to go down into the hollows, where you need to be mindful of Curiosity’s wheels slipping or having trouble turning in the sand,” said Ashley Stroup, an operations systems engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “There’s always a solution. It just takes trying different paths.”

Water on Mars

Orbital images of the boxwork showed characteristic dark lines. In 2014, it was suggested that there were cracks in the rocks where groundwater seeped in and allowed minerals to concentrate. After examining the ridges up close, Curiosity confirmed that these lines are indeed cracks.

The rover also discovered irregular formations called nodules, which are a clear sign of the presence of underground water in the past. Unexpectedly, these nodules were found not near the central cracks, but along the walls of the ridges and in the depressions between them.

This discovery is particularly important given the geography of the region. Curiosity is climbing the slope of the 5-kilometer-high Mount Sharp. Each layer was formed during different geological eras. The higher Curiosity climbs, the more signs of alternating periods of water drying up and wet periods with rivers and lakes appear in the landscape.

“Seeing boxwork this far up the mountain suggests the groundwater table had to be pretty high,” said Tina Seeger of Rice University in Houston, one of the mission scientists leading the boxwork research. “And that means the water needed for sustaining life could have lasted much longer than we thought looking from orbit.”

Sometime in March, Curiosity will leave the boxwork and begin studying the sulfate layer covering Mount Sharp. It consists of salt minerals formed as a result of water drying up. Studying it will help us learn even more about what the climate of the Red Planet was like billions of years ago.

• According to NASA
• Posted in News, Science

NASA’s Perseverance rover can now determine its location on the Red Planet independently, using its own “brain” and cameras. This saved it from having to “call” Earth every time to find out where it was. Engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) have essentially created a local navigation system for it that operates in real time.

Imagine you find yourself in the middle of a vast desert with no landmarks or maps, and you are only allowed one phone call per day to ask, “Where am I?” This is how JPL robotics expert Vandi Verma describes the many years of work done by rovers.

Blind navigation

Until recently, Perseverance, which has been exploring Jezero Crater for five years, relied on a combination of data: it analyzed images from its own cameras, measured wheel slip in dust, and cross-referenced satellite photos sent from Earth. However, due to the enormous distance of approximately 225 million kilometers, the signal took too long to arrive, so it took an entire Martian day to correct the route. If the rover was unsure of its position, it would simply stop and wait for “permission” from Earth. Over time, navigation errors accumulated and could reach more than 35 meters. 

Space Google Maps

To solve this problem, engineers led by Jeremy Nash and Vandy Verma developed the Mars Global Localization system. It’s a kind of “space Google Maps” for the Mars rover.

How does it work? Perseverance is now taking pictures of the surrounding area, and a built-in algorithm compares them with detailed maps obtained from orbital spacecraft such as the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in just two minutes. The system automatically finds common features in the landscape — rocks, craters, sand dunes — and determines the rover’s coordinates with an accuracy of 25 cm. Human intervention in this process is no longer necessary.

Breakthrough that has been decades in the making

Development of the technology began in 2023. Archival images from 264 rover stops were used to test the algorithm — the system never made a mistake. In early February 2024, the function was successfully applied in practice for the first time in real conditions on Mars.

“We have given the Mars rover a new ability. This has been an open problem in robotics for decades, and it is incredibly exciting to finally see it solved in space,” said Jeremy Nash.

This update came shortly after Perseverance learned to plan routes using generative artificial intelligence. The AI independently assesses the terrain for hazards — boulders, steep slopes — and plots a safe route.

The future of autonomous missions

Now that the rover knows its exact location online, it can move much faster and cover greater distances every day. As scientists note, it was uncertainty about coordinates, rather than the dangers of the landscape, that was the main limitation on its travels. 

This technology opens up a new era in the exploration of the Solar System. According to Vandy Verma, this algorithm is universal: “It can be used by almost any other rover that moves quickly and far.” This means that future missions to Mars and other planets will be able to work more efficiently, spending their time on real scientific discoveries rather than waiting for instructions from Earth.

Earlier, we explained what GPS is and how it has changed the world.

• According to NASA

Astronomers working with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have published a spectacular new image. It shows the galaxy NGC 5134.

NGC 5134 is located 65 million light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Virgo. This is a gigantic figure by human standards — we see the galaxy as it was at the time of the extinction of the dinosaurs. But by cosmological standards, NGC 5134 is quite close to us. And thanks to this relative proximity, JWST was able to see many details of its spiral structure.

JWST conducts observations in the near and mid-infrared range. The main source of “near” infrared waves are stars and star clusters scattered throughout the spiral arms of the galaxy. As for “medium” waves, they are emitted by warm dust, which saturates the gas clouds filling the galaxy. Dust particles consist of complex organic molecules called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. They form flat ring-shaped structures, very similar to honeycombs in beehives. On Earth, they are found in smoke from fires, car exhaust fumes, or, say, burnt toast.

By combining the data collected by JWST, astronomers were able to obtain a portrait of the life cycle of a galaxy. The gas clouds stretching along the spiral arms of NGC 5134 are sites of star formation. Each star that forms gradually depletes the available gas reserves. They are partially replenished in the process of the death of old stars. The largest stars, whose mass exceeds that of the Sun by more than eight times, do so in spectacular ways, as a result of catastrophic supernova explosions, ejecting their matter hundreds of light years away.

Stars similar to the Sun also return some of their material, although not as spectacularly. They become red giants, after which they shed their atmosphere into space, forming planetary nebulae. In the future, this ejected material may become part of a new generation of stars. The same fate awaits our Sun in the future.

• According to Esawebb

Everyone knows that there are volcanoes on Mars. Everyone knows that there are glaciers on Mars. But now scientists suggest that, at least on some volcanoes on the red planet, glaciers may be hidden under a layer of ash.

Prevalence of glaciers on Mars

When we think of ice on Mars, we usually mean the poles, where it can be seen with probes and even ground-based telescopes. But the poles are difficult to reach, and even more so because of restrictions on research there due to potential biological contamination. Scientists had long hoped to find water closer to the equator, which would make it more accessible to human explorers. There are parts of Mars’ mid-latitudes that look like glaciers covered with thick layers of dust and rocks.

So, do these formations really conceal large reserves of water near the place where humans may first set foot on the Red Planet? Perhaps, yes, according to a new article by M.A. de Pablo and his co-authors, recently published in the journal Icarus.

The key may be a small volcanic peninsula in Antarctica. Known as Deception Island, this volcano covered part of the surrounding huge glaciers with ash and dust from a series of eruptions in the 1960s and 1970s. The authors believe they have found a volcano with a similar history on Mars, known as Hecates Tholus. 

Hecates Tholus. is an ancient shield volcano on Mars that shares many of the same features as the volcano on Deception Island. And since we know that there is ice beneath the debris in Antarctica, this could mean that similar features may be found beneath the debris around Hecates Tholus.

Evidence of a glacier near Hecates Tholus

There is some compelling evidence on Mars that suggests the presence of glacial ice, rather than just loose rock or even rock cemented together with a small amount of ice. First and foremost, there are the crevasses. Any researcher will tell you how absurdly dangerous these features are on Earth, but the key characteristic on Deception Island is their visibility from space, especially near the so-called “headwalls” of the glacier — steep, almost vertical cliffs at the upper end of the glacier.

Such features are visible from space on Hecates Tholus, and such clear, visible fractures would not be noticeable if there were simply rock beneath them. In particular, these fractures mean that the solid ice core is still moving beneath the surface of volcanic debris.

Another direct piece of evidence is the presence of bergschrunds. These are distinct, deep cracks that form at the top of a glacier. Technically, all bergschrunds are a type of crack, although they are significantly larger and are formed by a very specific process compared to ordinary cracks. This process consists of separating movable ice from frozen ice. Some examples of bergschrunds near Hecates Tholus reach lengths of 600 m and are clear evidence that, at least at a certain point in time, there was active ice movement.

The final proof is the bulldozer effect, or, more precisely, the presence of “push moraines” at the bottom of the valleys of both Deception Island and Hecates Tholus. When glaciers move, they act like bulldozers, pushing huge rocks in front of them and leaving hilly terrain behind. Similar formations, such as those seen on Deception Island, are again visible around the volcano, indicating that a glacier once actively existed in this area.

Overview and context of Hecates Tholus, Mars (left) and the terrestrial analog, Deception Island (right).

Credit: Icarus (2026).

DOI: 10.1016/j.icarus.2026.116966

How to find hidden glaciers?

So if these glaciers really exist, how have they managed to survive for millions of years without evaporating? The authors propose a two-stage process. Initially, when cracks formed, some of the water actually sublimated, but these holes were then covered with dust, protecting the newly exposed water from further sublimation. Ultimately, this led to the formation of shallow “troughs,” which we actually see on Mars instead of real cracks.

One obvious question for people who closely follow Mars exploration is: why didn’t SHARAD see anything there? If there is a subsurface glacier at the equator, then the ground-penetrating radar on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter would undoubtedly be able to detect a signal from it. The physics of SHARAD radar does not work well on the steep slopes of volcanoes, making it difficult to obtain a clear image of what lies beneath the dust and debris. In order to truly understand the situation better, we will need samples from the surface, both from robots and from humans.

Fraser talks about the restriction of exploration missions to the Martian South Pole.

Avoid contamination

If there really are huge glaciers on Mars hidden beneath the dome of Hecate, there may be many others hidden beneath other massive volcanoes. Article IX of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty requires that exploration of other bodies in the Solar System be conducted in such a way as to avoid “harmful contamination” of celestial bodies. Many interpreted this article as a requirement for researchers to avoid the Martian poles, where there is evidence of large amounts of water. If it turns out that there is water all over Mars, hidden under volcanic debris, does that mean that these areas are now also off-limits to researchers?

Only time will tell the answer to this question — we may never know if there is water around these volcanoes unless we send researchers there — everything we can do remotely is limited. There are some proposals for missions that could resolve this question, such as FlyRADAR, but we will have to wait for the final word on whether Martian volcanoes are covered by glaciers — and perhaps look at the deceptive volcano on our own planet in the meantime.

• According to phys.org