INFORMATION

The Hakuto-R 2 mission launched on January 15, 2025. It’s the successor to Hakuto-R, which launched in December 2022 but failed when it lost communications during its descent. Both missions carried rovers, and this image was captured by the rover Resilience as it travels toward the Moon. The company behind Hakuto-R 1 and 2 is ispace . ispace develops robotics and other technologies that they intend to use to compete for commercial contracts. These missions are technology demonstration missions. Hakuto-R 1 carried the Emirates Lunar Mission , a rover named Rashid. Hakuto-R 2 carries ispace’s own micro-rover named Resilience. ispace posted this image on social media with the text, “The RESILIENCE lander remains in excellent health as it continues to orbit Earth in its planned trajectory towards the Moon!” “RESILIENCE knows what it means to be alone in the vastness of space. Looking back at Earth on Jan. 25, 2025, the lander was about 10,000km from our Blue Marble, poignantly capturin...

A galactic merger is a chaotic event. When two massive structures like galaxies merge, their powerful gravitational forces wrench stars out of their usual orbits in a process called violent relaxation . In essence, the merging galaxies are evolving rapidly, and small perturbations can be amplified as the system moves toward a more stationary state. Intuition suggests that this chaos should disrupt the galaxy, including its star formation, but new observations of the Arp 220 galaxy merger show that something else happens: the merger creates a massive magnetic field that traps gas and encourages more stars to form. Arp 220 is one of the closest galaxy mergers to us. It’s also extremely bright in infrared and is considered to be the prototypical ULIRG—an Ultraluminous Infrared Galaxy . It’s the result of two spiral galaxies merging. The galaxies are gas-rich, which triggers starburst activity in Arp 220’s central regions. In new research, scientists from the Harvard and Smithsonian Cen...

According to the Giant Impact Hypothesis , the Moon formed from a massive impact between a primordial Earth and a Mars-sized object (Theia) roughly 4.5 billion years ago. This is largely based on the study of sample rocks retrieved by the Apollo missions and seismic studies, which revealed that the Earth and Moon are similar in composition and structure. Further studies of the surface have revealed features that suggest the planet was once volcanically active, including lunar maria (dark, flat areas filled with solidified lava). In the past, researchers suspected that these maria were formed by contractions in the interior that occurred billions of years ago and that the Moon has remained dormant ever since. However, a new study conducted by researchers from the National Air and Space Museum (NASM) and the University of Maryland (UMD) revealed small ridges on the Moon’s far side that are younger than those on the near side. Their findings constitute another line of evidence that the...