Eris and Makemake may be more active than we thought. New observations from JWST suggest that the icy dwarf planets Eris and Makemake might have warm geochemistry taking place in their rocky cores. Both worlds are located in the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune, an area that is turning out to host much more dynamic worlds than researchers had previously expected. Pictured: An artist’s concept of Makemake and its moon, nicknamed MK 2. Image credit: NASA / ESA / A. Parker (SWRI).
The sample from OSIRIS-REx is double what the mission intended to collect. Now that its sample container has been fully opened, the team behind NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission has reported that the spacecraft delivered 121.6 grams (4.29 ounces) of material from asteroid Bennu. This is the largest asteroid sample ever collected in space and over twice the mission’s requirement.
NASA is looking for Martians. The agency recently opened a call for participants in a simulated year-long Mars mission. A four-person volunteer crew will be selected to live and work inside a 158-square-meter (1,700-square-foot) habitat based at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. The crew will simulate spacewalks and robotic operations, maintain their habitat, grow crops, and deal with the challenges of a mission on the Martian surface, including equipment failures and communication delays.
A new Australian lunar “Roo-ver” is in the works. The Australian Space Agency is building a semi-autonomous rover, named “Roo-ver” after Australia’s national animal, the kangaroo, through a public contest. The rover will launch to the Moon as early as 2026 through a partnership with NASA’s Artemis program, where it will collect samples of regolith from which NASA will try to extract oxygen as a test of technologies that would enable human exploration of the lunar surface.