Carolyn Shoemaker, discoverer of dozens of comets and hundreds of asteroids, has died at age 92. Many of her discoveries were shared with her husband Gene Shoemaker, who for many years headed a project to search for near-Earth objects using the small Palomar Schmidt camera. The couple, along with David Levy, discovered one of the most famous comets, Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, which impacted Jupiter in 1994. Carolyn served as a pioneer for women in science. Gene died in 1997 in an auto collision.

Sampling Mars, Or Not – Mars rover Perseverance was commanded to drill its first sample of Martian rock and soil, and store it in one of its 43 titanium sample tubes, to be returned to Earth by a future mission. Telemetry showed the rover completed all steps as designed, but checks of the sample tube found it empty. Spacecraft controllers believe that the material sampled was too powdery and fell out of the coring drill. This never happened in more than one hundred tests of the sampling process on Earth using a variety of simulated Martian rocks and soil. Mars can surprise us. Controllers are giving up on this place and will proceed to a new sample location.

Ingenuity –The Mars helicopter added three more flights in this past month, for a total of twelve, exceeding 1.6 miles in total distance flown and 21 minutes total flight time. It set new records for flight time (169 seconds) and altitude (39 feet). It imaged in stereo Raised Ridges and Séítah, areas that the rover Perseverance may visit. The latter area is named with a Navajo word meaning “amidst the sand”.

Martian Interior – The InSight Mars lander has been monitoring marsquakes since late 2018, and scientists just released their first report on what has been learned about the interior of the planet. The Martian core is molten, though it is not yet known if there is also a solid portion to the core, like the Earth’s core. The Red Planet’s crust was thinner than expected and stretches to one or two dozen miles thick. It has at least two distinct layers, and possibly three. The mantle occupies the space between the crust and core, and extends to 969 miles in depth. The new results were based on the 35 strongest marsquakes yet recorded, all between magnitude 3.0 and 4.0. There have been 733 recorded marsquakes, but most were quite weak, and therefore did not provide a strong enough signal to distinguish what internal layers they had passed through or reflected from. The InSight seismometer continues to take data, and scientists hope to discover more about the Martian interior. Scientists were surprised to find that all of the planet’s strong quakes originated in a single area, that known as Cerberus Fossae, which is believed to have had volcanic activity in geologically recent times. However other areas that have obvious volcanic features did not contribute any marsquakes. It is not known whether this means those areas do not have quakes or that the core is shadowing the quake waves from reaching InSight.

Venus Weather – The night side of Venus has been little studied due to the difficulty of observing in the dark. Using the infrared capabilities of the Japanese Venus orbiter Akatsuki, researchers at the University of Tokyo discovered atmosphere circulating toward the planet’s equator only on the night side. Combined with other currents on the dayside, this may be driving Venus’s super-rotation, which is an extreme east-west circulation of all Venusian weather. The infrared images were not bright enough to show the new discovery until multiple images were stacked using compensation for motion between images.

Jovian Radio Source – Using data from the Jupiter orbiter Juno, researchers at NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center located where radio emissions originate on Jupiter. The source is a hollow cone-shaped region aligned with the planet’s rotating magnetic field. Electrons in the region create the radio waves, which were found to be much more energetic than previously believed. The electrons are generated when material expelled from volcanoes on the moon Io is broken apart into ions and electrons.

Jupiter’s Energy Crisis – The amount of sunlight at Jupiter’s orbit should warm the planet’s upper atmosphere to only about minus 100 degrees Fahrenheit, but measurements show it to be much warmer, about 800 degrees Fahrenheit. Some scientists refer to this as Jupiter’s energy crisis. A team of astronomers at the JAXA Institute of Space and Astronautical Science used observations from the Juno spacecraft, the Keck Telescope in Hawaii, and the Japanese Hisaki spacecraft to better understand this crisis. They found that Jupiter’s aurora is heating the upper atmosphere in the planet’s polar areas. The heat was then observed to spread towards the equator, explaining the warm temperature of the entire atmosphere. This spreading of the heat was unexpected because computer models of Jupiter’s atmosphere always showed that heat applied near the poles would get trapped there.

Ganymedean Water Vapor – Water vapor was discovered in the atmosphere of the Jovian moon Ganymede using new and archived ultraviolet spectroscopic data from the Hubble Space Telescope by researchers at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. The source of this is surface ice turning to vapor, or sublimating. It is believed that water on Ganymede is in the form of ice to a depth of about 100 miles, but likely has a liquid ocean below that, too far below to contribute vapor. The discoverers were looking to confirm previous reports of atomic oxygen in Ganymede’s atmosphere, but instead found water vapor and hardly any atomic oxygen.

Bennu – The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft spent over two years near the asteroid Bennu. An analysis of precision spacecraft tracking data was made to know precisely where Bennu was over that time, allowing astronomers to predict the asteroid’s position much farther into the future. Also measured were Bennu’s size, shape, mass, composition, spin, and proclivity to spit particles, all of which very slightly affect its orbit. Bennu is classified as a potentially hazardous asteroid because it is known to occasionally pass quite close to Earth. After this analysis scientists now know that Bennu will not strike the Earth in 2135, as was predicted in the past by some. But it will come close enough for Earth’s gravity to deflect it into a somewhat different orbit, allowing the possibility that it may hit our planet in the 2180s. The most likely hit is September 24, 2182, with a probability of one chance in 2,700. Astronomers are worried about any chance of a collision and will try to refine the precision of this possibility, even though our knowledge of Bennu’s orbit is already the most precise of any asteroid’s orbit ever.

Lunar Magnetic Field, Or Not – The Earth has a magnetic field that protects it from some kinds of solar radiation. That magnetic field is generated by electric currents in the planet’s core. The Moon does not now have such a magnetic field, but it has long been debated whether it had one in the past. Differences between the Moon’s core and Earth’s core may have made such a field impossible. However, studies of Moon rocks from the Apollo Moon landings found some rocks that retained magnetic fields apparently from the time the rocks formed. A new study of Moon rocks by scientists at the University of Rochester using an extremely sensitive superconducting magnetometer has concluded that the Moon never had a protective magnetic field and that the Moon rocks that do have a residual magnetic field were magnetized by meteorite impacts. Every rock in this study found to have a strong residual magnetic field was also found to have evidence of meteorite impact.

Unusual Gamma-ray Burst – About a year ago the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope detected what appeared to be a short gamma-ray burst. Scientists believe that gamma-ray bursts longer than about two seconds are caused by supernova explosions of massive stars while shorter gamma-ray bursts are caused by merging of neutron stars. However, there has been some evidence that a small fraction of the short bursts are also caused by supernovas. Last year’s Fermi-detected burst supports this, as it was definitely caused by a supernova and lasted less than one second. The source is so distant that it took the gamma rays 6.6 billion years to reach us. Infrared light that matched the brightness pattern and spectrum of a supernova was detected in follow-up observations. It was observed in radio also. The best theory explaining this burst is that the gamma rays are produced by particle jets after they punch out of the exploding star, and that this supernova’s jets fizzled shortly after punching through, resulting in the anomalously short gamma-ray burst. This work was led by researchers at Nanjing University in China and the University of Maryland, College Park.

X-ray Echoes – Scientists at Stanford University used the XMM-Newton and NuSTAR X-ray space telescopes to monitor X-ray flares from the material surrounding a black hole. Shortly after the flares, fainter echoes of the flares were observed, which had reflected off material behind the black hole. These echoes would have been obscured by the black hole itself, except that the X-rays were bent around the black hole by the relativistic curvature of space due to the extreme gravity of the black hole. The black hole is the supermassive one at the center of a galaxy known as I Zwicky 1, which is 800 million light-years away.

Moon-Forming Disk – Using ALMA, an array of radiotelescopes in Chile, astronomers at the University of Grenoble made the first unambiguous detection of a disk about an exoplanet, which is possibly forming moons. The still-forming planet is known as PDS 70c, and is one of two gas giants in the system. The other planet does not appear to have such a disk. The diameter of the disk is about one AU, the distance of the Sun from the Earth. Astronomers hope that study of the newly found disk will help them understand how moons and planets form. The two planets were discovered in the past three years using the Very Large Telescope, a group of 8-meter optical telescopes in Chile.

Exoplanet Imaged – There is an international survey designed to image exoplanets orbiting far from their stars, where it’s easier to see them. The survey is named “Coconuts,” an acronym of Cool Companions on Ultrawide Orbits. This explains why a recently discovered exoplanet was dubbed the unlikely-sounding name of Coconuts-2b. It is the closest imaged exoplanet, at 35 light-years distant. It has about six times the mass of Jupiter. When it was first discovered, astronomers thought it was a free-floating planet, not orbiting any star, but eventually they found a star that the planet orbited at a great distance. Because it is imageable, astronomers hope to study it and learn much about gas giants. An observer above the cloud tops of Coconuts-2b would see little difference between night and day since its sun is so far away.

Small Exoplanet – Astronomers at the University of Porto in Portugal found the least massive exoplanet measured using the radial velocity method. The planet has about half the mass of Venus. It orbits a star known as L 98-59, which is only 35 light-years away. Three planets in this system were measured using telescopes in Chile. They are rocky planets, and two of them may contain a little water, while the half-Venus mass one might contain considerable amounts of water, according to their densities. These three planets were first detected by the planet-finding space telescope TESS. A fourth planet has now been found in the system, and there are hints of a fifth in the data.

Red Dwarf Flares – Life is unlikely on a planet orbiting a young red dwarf star because such stars frequently blast out deadly flares. A new study by astronomers at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam shows that may not be as dangerous as it sounds. They found that the flares from such stars are emitted from near the stars’ poles, while planets usually form in the equatorial plane of their star, so the flares would usually miss any orbiting planets. The new study used observations from the spacecraft TESS. By monitoring the light curves of flares as they rotate in or out of view, scientists were able to determine the latitude upon the stars of some of the flares. Only four cases produced accurate latitudes, but all four were found to be above 55 degrees latitude.

Sun-like Star – Scientists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center are studying a star found to be much like our Sun in mass and temperature, except it is much younger. They hope to use it to better understand our Sun’s history. The star is Kappa 1 Ceti and is located about 30 light-years away. They estimate it to be only 600 to 750 million years old. When our Sun was this old, life was just developing on Earth. Scientists have developed a computer model of the star to predict its stellar winds, which may affect any planets significantly. They plan to use similar techniques to study the star EK Draconis, which is only 100 million years old.

Milky Way Survey – Astronomers at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, using the Jansky Very Large Array of radiotelescopes in New Mexico and the 100-meter Effelsberg radiotelescope in Germany, made a detailed survey of much of the Milky Way. The array is most sensitive to smaller structures while the Effelsberg was better for larger structures. Radio waves penetrate dust better than many other wavelengths of light, so the survey found many areas of star formation and many supernova remnants that were previously unknown because they were hidden by dust. The newly found remnants should help solve the “missing supernova remnant” problem, how far fewer such remnants had been found than theory predicts should have been created by supernova explosions.

Cosmic Rays and Supernovas – A new study by researchers at the University of Oxford, created a computer simulation of supernovas that took into account the creation of cosmic rays and how they affected the supernovas’ properties. Cosmic rays are charged particles moving at extreme speeds, thought to be generated during supernova explosions of massive stars. The simulations showed that the cosmic rays boosted the speed of gas flowing away from supernovas by four to six times. The effect was found to be greater on less dense gas. These findings could help explain bubbles around supernovas or shutting down of star formation.

X-ray Telescope – The German X-ray space telescope eRosita was designed with a large field of view so that it could complete surveys of the entire sky in a matter of months. Recently released data contain more than 3 million newly-discovered X-ray sources. Black holes, neutron stars, and hot gas in galaxy clusters commonly are easily seen in X-rays, and yet are difficult in other forms of light. Of the 3 million new objects, 77 percent are black holes in other galaxies, 20 percent are objects in the Milky Way, and 3 percent are galaxy clusters. eRosita is sensitive enough to see many objects so far that their X-ray light takes 7 billion years to reach us. This will allow astronomers to put together a history of how X-ray objects have evolved over the last 7 billion years. eRosita is an instrument aboard the Russian-German spacecraft Spectrum-Roentgen-Gamma, which observes from the Sun-Earth Lagrange point 2, about a million miles from Earth.

Hopper – NASA has funded development of a small spacecraft that will hop, rather than rove, to explore our Moon. The agency plans to send it to craters near the lunar south pole. It will ride to the Moon with the much larger Nova-C lander, planned for flight in December next year.

Nauka and Starliner – Hours after the new Russian module Nauka latched onto the International Space Station (ISS), its thrusters fired when they were not supposed to, slowly tumbling ISS. Other thrusters were then fired to stop the motion, which took about an hour, and return ISS to its proper orientation. The situation forced postponement of what is supposed to the final test flight of the Boeing Starliner without crew before it goes into service transporting astronauts to and from ISS. However, the next attempt to fly Starliner was also postponed to investigate a problem with rocket valves.