iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

This map doesn't look like much...until you realize what it is. This is a measurement of *all the mass in the universe* between here & the cosmic microwave background (the edge of the visible cosmos), as deduced from its collective gravitational pull. 🔭🧪 news.uchicago.edu/story/south-...

The global minimal variance lensing map (which combines temperatuer and polarization data) reconstructed from the observed SPT-3G D1 maps

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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Remarkably, this Jupiter-size planet is likely to survive. More remarkably, if it has large moons they will (briefly) reside in the habitable zone around their white dwarf star. Imagine how strange life would be there... 🔭🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This artist’s concept depicts a possible explanation for the unusual chemical abundances the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope detected in the HS 0209+0832 system: a second-generation planet orbiting the white dwarf star.

The white dwarf is the “dead” core of a star that burned through all of its nuclear fuel and lost its outer envelope of gas and dust to space. The second-generation planet formed from that cast-off gas and dust, which is why its chemical content is very different from a planet that formed as its host star was forming.

The white dwarf is still hot and is blasting the planet with radiation, causing it to lose atmosphere to space. That atmospheric material is flowing back toward the white dwarf, forming a disk and then falling back onto its surface, which is how Hubble detected the planetary chemical signatures when studying the star.

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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Out of a wreckage of a dying star, a new planet was born. And now that planet is evaporating like a comet, leaving a trail that whips around the star every 4 days. It's a remarkable story written in chemical clues. Nobody has ever seen anything like it before. 🧪🔭 esahubble.org/news/heic2613/

In this (not-to-scale) artist’s concept, a lower-mass star like the Sun (1) ages into a puffy red giant star (2) that eventually expels its outer envelope of gas and dust into space, which forms a disk around the bright cinder of its remaining core, called a white dwarf (3). A second-generation planet forms in this disk, orbiting the white dwarf and losing some of its atmosphere back onto the white dwarf’s surface (4).

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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

After Hera reaches Dimorphos on November 25, it will map the asteroid at 1-meter resolution, study its gravity & inner structure, deploy 2 cubesats, and test rendezvous techniques that could be crucial for deflecting or mining asteroids in the future. 🧪🔭 www.heramission.space

Hera will be humankind's first probe to closely investigate a binary asteroid system. It will find out more about this type of asteroid and explore asteroid deflection. This infographic describes the Hera mission from its lift off from Earth to the end of the nominal Hera mission at Didymos.

Along the way, Hera will carry out lots of science, including measuring the properties of the asteroid and investigating the crater left by DART crashing into the asteroid’s surface. It will also demonstrate some impressive new technologies.

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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Today in space: The Hera spacecraft is about to perform a hard burn so it can meet up with asteroid Dimorphos. 4 years ago, NASA deliberately crashed a probe into Dimorphos. Starting next month, Hera will map the wreckage. 🧪🔭 www.esa.int/Space_Safety...

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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

The Nobel Prize in physics goes to Francis Halzen, who figured out how to turn a cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice into a neutrino detector. The resulting IceCube experiment is now studying extreme events across the universe. 🔭🧪 www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physi...

Francis Halzen, winner of the 2026 Nobel prize in physics

Schematic of the IceCube experiment in Antarctica

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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

This is your periodic reminder that humans are clever & are capable of great feats of discovery. We can solve huge problems when we set our minds to it, too. Here, seeing neutrinos from the bottom of a Canadian mine: 🧪 snoplus.phy.queensu.ca/geo.html

The expected geo-neutrino energy spectrum at the SNO+ detector in Sudbury, Ontario.

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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

We can't touch the deep interior of our planet, but we can now see it in the "light" of neutrinos emitted by radioactive elements. Early results suggest our Earth is intriguingly lopsided. 🧪 www.quantamagazine.org/neutrinos-fr...

Lateral variation of mantle geoneutrino signal predicted for a “thermochemical piles” model. Early results seem to confirm this model.

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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

The birth of Earth's Moon would have created a similar debris cloud around the Sun 4.5 billion years ago. We might be seeing analogous catastrophic moments of destruction & rebirth around other stars right now. (Art by Chesley Bonestell, one of my favorites.) 🔭🧪 iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3...

"Earth is Born": Cover art for Life magazine, December 1952. A dramatic depiction of the formation of the Earth's continents. This was the first of several Bonestell paintings illustrating the essay series by Lincoln Barnett entitled "The World We Live In."

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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

In astronomy, modest data points can hide stories of extreme drama. Here, each purple and white dot indicates a place where planets are colliding & destroying each other, releasing huge clouds of debris. (Artist's interpretation at right.) 🧪🔭 science.nasa.gov/missions/web...

Left: By investigating the compositions of extreme debris disks, scientists inferred that silica-rich disks are produced by high-energy impacts of Mars-sized objects, while silica-poor disks are created by less energetic events from Moon-sized bodies.
Right: The types of collisions within young stellar systems known as extreme debris disks are relevant to scientists’ understanding of our own solar system, which is thought to have undergone similar impact events that created our Moon and shaped Earth’s initial state.
Artwork: NASA, ESA, CSA, Joseph Olmsted (STScI)

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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

China's Einstein Probe satellite uses "lobster eye" optics to provide a unique, wide-field look at the x-ray sky. If something goes bump in the night (in x-rays!), Einstein will see it. 🧪🔭 ep.bao.ac.cn/leia/

X-ray all-sky map obtained by China's Einstein Probe satellite

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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Enigmatic flashes of x-rays in the sky may come from the catastrophic merger of two stars, creating an ultra-dense and ultra-magnetc remnant called a magnetar. The finding come from another kind of merger, one of Chinese & EU science missions. 🧪🔭 www.sciencedaily.com/releases/202...

Artist's impression of the Einstein Probe satellite observing the long-lasting soft X-ray emission from a binary neutron star merger and its post-merger remnant. The inset illustrates the schematic duration comparison of the burst emission detected in X-rays and gamma-rays.

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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Here comes the nor'easter, seen by the GOES-19 satellite. It's building outside my apartment, and it is *loud*. (The storm, that is, not the satellite.) 🧪 www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/goes/conus.p...

Nor'easter imaged by the GOES-19 satellite.

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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

A surprise in the new computer simulations: The outcome of a giant impact depends sensitively on the temperature & composition of the protoplanet that (probably) struck Earth. A slight change would have produced a different kind of Moon, or no Moon at all. 🧪🔭 iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3...

Final state of two identical Moon-forming simulations at 1 M particle resolution, (top) without and (bottom) with strength, for identical initial temperature structures: hot (∼2000 K) but mostly solid. The proto-Earth is 0.877M⊕, and Theia is 0.133M⊕. Impact angle is θcoll = 45∘, the most probable, and impact velocity is vcoll/vesc = 1

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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

There's a lot we still don't know about how the Moon formed, but new computer simulations show that the Moon might have come together in just a *few hours*. Which makes me feel really unproductive today. 🧪🔭 www.swri.org/newsroom/pre...

Final state of three identical Moon-forming simulations with different initial temperature profiles, from cold to hot: Tsurf ≈ 400 K (top row), Tsurf ≈ 800 K (middle row), and Tsurf ≈ 2000 K (bottom row), with strength included, shown at t = 0.5, 5, 12, and 24 hr. Colors represent temperature (see color bar).

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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

How does a planet devour a moon? Full technical answer at the link. 🧪 iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3...

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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

The Moon shaped a lot of life on Earth, including holidays (like Yom Kippur) anchored to the lunar calendar. But moons are delicate things. We managed to keep ours. Venus may have eaten its moon. One more way it lost out... 🧪🔭 news.ucr.edu/articles/202...

Scientists have long speculated why Venus, with a similar size, mass, and structure to Earth, doesn’t have a moon. New UC Riverside research shows it’s because our hungry twin likely swallowed it.

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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Beautiful and surprising every time.

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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

The new lunar impact also created a big new cold spot on the Moon. Seems that the incoming asteroid loosened up the Moon dust, so it doesn't hold heat as well. Nighttime temperatures around McGetchin crater are about 8 degrees C colder than its surroundings. 🧪🔭 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Wow: Giant new impact crater spotted on the Moon! An asteroid the size of an apartment building hit the lunar surface in early 2024 & created 220-meter (730-foot) wide McGetchin crater. It's "the largest contemporary impact crater found in the Solar System." 🧪🔭 science.nasa.gov/solar-system...

Officially named McGetchin after pioneering lunar scientist Tom McGetchin, the crater formed on the Moon’s eastern edge sometime between April 11 and May 22, 2024, after a comet or asteroid the size of a three- to six-story building hit the surface.

The crash left a crater, 728 feet wide, that spans the length of two football fields. And at 141 feet deep, the crater could fit three vertically stacked yellow school buses. Scientists estimate that an impact of this magnitude happens on the Moon about once in a century or even longer.

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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Look closely, and there's even more to see: shockwaves, distant galaxies, gravitational bending of light. This nebula is full of planet-mass objects that formed on their own like stars. What to call them? NASA says "brown dwarfs." Many astronomers disagree. 🧪🔭 science.nasa.gov/asset/webb/i...

This collage features a collection of insets from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s image of star-forming region IC 348: embedded stars, a central star cluster, faint outflows, Herbig-Haro objects, gravitational lensing, and spiral galaxies.
Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, Kevin Luhman (PSU), Catarina Alves de Oliveira (ESA), Mahdi Zamani (ESA/Webb)

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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Just in: A gorgeous new panorama of creation in our galaxy, taken by JWST. This image shows infant stars shooting out jets, baby stars emerging from dusty cocoons, young planet-like objects floating alone & starless, and one planet birthing planets of its own. 🧪🔭 science.nasa.gov/asset/webb/i...

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope recently observed IC 348, a star-forming region just 1,000 light-years away from Earth. Webb’s sharp vision revealed tiny brown dwarfs, some just twice Jupiter’s mass, and young stars ejecting powerful jets crashing into surrounding gas and dust.
Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, Kevin Luhman (PSU), Catarina Alves de Oliveira (ESA), Mahdi Zamani (ESA/Webb)

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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

90% of all the helium in the universe today was already around at the time of the Big Bang. All the stars in the universe, cranking out fusion reactions for 13 billion years, have managed to contribute only 10%. That's how efficient solar/stellar energy is! 🔭🧪 iopscience.iop.org/collections/...

The Andromeda Galaxy, a typical spiral galaxy of the modern universe.

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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

According to the standard model of the Big Bang, the universe was born containing 24.7% helium by mass. A new galaxy survey finds that the actual helium content was 24.6% (with a little uncertainty)! It's amazing that human brains figured out how the universe began. 🧪🔭 news.osu.edu/using-helium...

The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has captured a spectacular view of the galaxy I Zwicky 18 (I Zw 18) in this new image. The galaxy was first identified by Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky in the 1930’s and resides roughly 59 million light-years from Earth.

This galaxy has gone through several sudden bursts of star formation. This galaxy is typical of the kinds of galaxies that inhabited the early Universe and it is classified as a dwarf irregular galaxy (much smaller than our Milky Way). Galaxies like this one make it possible to measure how much helium the universe was born with.

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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

There's a sense of community born out of shared trauma, and one born out of shared aspirations. 9/11 brought us the first, briefly. When I watched the launch of NASA's Roman telescope, I saw a lot of the latter. We need more of that kind of community: optimistic, forward-looking, sustainable. 🧪🔭

A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket with NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Telescope on board is seen transiting the sun during launch from Launch Complex 39A, Sunday, Aug. 30, 2026, at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
NASA/John Kraus

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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

There is something sadly Suessian about our current situation.

Sneetches, man. We are living in an age of Sneetches.

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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

A new study has exposed a major blind spot in our view of the cosmos. Objects that shine in extreme UV are among the most energetic sources in galaxies. Yet we've overlooked them because we lack the right instruments & they get hidden by interstellar fog. 🧪🔭 chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2026/m...

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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

The galaxy pair is also known as "Nā ʻUhane Māhoe Huki Pū i ke Ola" (“Twin Spirits Pulling Together Creating Life"). The name was chosen by a trio of high school interns who helped direct the creation of this image using the Gemini North observatory. 🧪🔭 noirlab.edu/public/news/...

Project Hōkūlani interns Alia Tamanha, Raiyan Rahman, and Rafan Rahman visited the Gemini North telescope on Maunakea to learn about telescope operations and the diversity of careers that exist on the mauna. They inspired the new image of the galaxy pair "Nā ʻUhane Māhoe Huki Pū i ke Ola"

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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Gas + gravity + time leads to surprising and gorgeous results. Look at this peculiar galaxy pair, NGC 7253. Gravity caused a couple hundred billion balls of hydrogen to light up as stars, held together in two great swarms that then collided, scattered & reassembled. 🧪🔭 noirlab.edu/public/image...

Nā ʻUhane Māhoe Huki Pū i ke Ola is the Hawaiian name given to this image of NGC 7253 — a pair of spiral galaxies caught in each other’s gravity. This image was captured by the Gemini North telescope on Maunakea, one half of the International Gemini Observatory, partly funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and operated by NSF NOIRLab. The name of the image, which translates to “The Twin Spirits Pulling Together Creating Life,” was chosen by the 2026 Project Hōkūlani interns.

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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

A Chinese spy satellite broke up in an unusual retrograde (backward) orbit, creating a field of space debris that will remain up there for decades or more. There have now been more than 600 fragmentation events in Earth orbit. 🧪🔭 spacenews.com/chinese-reco...

A Long March 6A rocket lifts off from Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center, March 15, 2026, carrying the Yaogan-50 (02) satellite into orbit. Credit: CASC

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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

It's been a long, challenging path to Mercury. A glitch with BepiColombo's thruster added a year to its travel time. But the probe will reach final orbit in December & science begins next spring. Mercury like we've never seen it before! 🧪🔭 arstechnica.com/space/2026/0...

A monitoring camera onboard the Mercury Transfer Module captured this view of Mercury’s cratered surface during a flyby on January 8, 2025. Credit: ESA/BepiColombo/MTM

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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

The BepiColombo spacecraft just broke in two. In December, the remainder will split in two again. It's all part of the elaborate preparations for making the best-ever observations of the enigmatic planet Mercury. 🧪🔭 www.esa.int/Science_Expl...

Artist’s impression showing the Mercury Transfer Module separate from the BepiColombo Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) and Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (MMO) composite spacecraft. The transfer module is only needed for the journey to Mercury. The two science orbiters will be captured into Mercury orbit, and the small thrusters on MPO will be used to deliver MMO into its orbit. There, MMO will be ejected from MPO and spun up. MPO will then discard the sunshield, and continue into its own orbit around Mercury.

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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

The first private Venus probe--part of a planned set of Morning Star Missions--is taking shape in California. It will sample the Venusian clouds to see if they could possibly support life. But for now it's grounded, awaiting the debut of its Neutron rocket. 🧪🔭 www.leonarddavid.com/unveiling-ve...

Sara Seager holds a mission to Venus probe to investigate its atmosphere. Image credit: Sara Seager

An illustration shows Rocket Lab's Photon spacecraft above the clouds of Venus (Image credit: Rocket Lab)

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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Two magnetic observatories in London recorded the effects of the Carrington Event. The readings were, literally, off the charts. A day earlier, astronomer Richard Carrington had observed an eruption on the Sun and recognized a new phenomenon: a solar flare. 🧪🔭 geomag.bgs.ac.uk/education/ca...

The 'Carrington Event' of August 27th to September 7th, 1859 - recorded at Greenwich Observatory, London. Declination, or compass direction, (D) is the lower trace on each image and the horizontal force (H) is the upper trace. Universal Time is the time recorded here (astronomical) plus 12 hours and measured D precedes H by approximately 12 hours.

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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Happy Carrington Event Day to all who celebrate. On Sept 2-3, 1859, a huge solar flare hit Earth with the most intense magnetic storm on record. Auroras bloomed, magnetometers went wild, and telegraph machines sparked around the world. 🧪 link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Carrington’s (1859) carefully executed drawing of his sunspot group 520 on 1 September 1859, the first visual record of a solar flare. The initial (A and B) and final (C and D) positions of the white-light emission are indicated. Solar east is to the right. Below: Enlargement of region 520 from an early solar photograph made at Kew Observatory by Warren De la Rue on 31 August 1859.

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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

The decagon at Saturn's south pole joins the long-lived hexagon cloud formation at Saturn's north pole. How do flowing winds form such orderly geometric patterns? Nobody knows, exactly. 🧪🔭 science.nasa.gov/mission/cass...

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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

The Hubble telescope has spotted an enormous, 10-sized geometric cloud pattern encircling Saturn's south pole. And this Saturn decagon seems to be new, taking shape as we watch. Weird winds are wiggling on the ringed planet! 🔭🧪 science.nasa.gov/missions/hub...

Recent NASA Hubble Space Telescope images show the gas giant Saturn and its southern pole, where astronomers have discovered a 10-sided atmospheric wave. Observations show the decagon extends through multiple layers of Saturn’s atmosphere. Image: NASA, ESA, STScI, Agustin Sánchez-Lavega (UPV), Amy Simon (NASA-GSFC), Michael Wong (UC Berkeley); Image Processing: Alyssa Pagan

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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

What struck a xenon atom and triggered a flash of light inside the LZ detector. A particle of dark matter? Too soon to tell. Everyone is looking *very* closely for a second event. 🧪🔭 Full paper available at link: lz.lbl.gov

When a WIMP collides with a xenon atom, the xenon atom emits a flash of light and electrons. The light is detected at the top and bottom of the liquid xenon chamber. An electric field drifts the electrons to the top of the chamber, where they generate a second flash of light. Credit: Greg Stewart, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Something weird showed up in the data from the LZ dark-matter detector in South Dakota. It's a single event. It could be an error. But it's an intriguing, anomalous signal with no obvious physical observation...and "weird" can be the gateway to big discoveries. 🧪🔭 news.ucsb.edu/2026/022780/...

The LUX-ZEPLIN main detector in a surface lab before installation underground at the SURF facility in Lead, South Dakota.

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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

Liftoff! The Roman Space Telescope is on its way to the place where it was built to live. 🔭🧪

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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

The Sun is coming up right behind the Falcon Heavy carrying the Roman Space Telescope. Glorious! 🔭🧪

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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

In Florida, awaiting the launch of the Roman Space Telescope--NASA's next great space observatory. 🔭🧪 science.nasa.gov/blogs/roman/

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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Amazing: Scientists see evidence of flowing liquid on the surface of Pluto. Pluto! The fluid is probably liquid nitrogen. In every environment, it seems, some elements or compounds behave in dynamic ways, producing active geology from Mercury to Pluto (and beyond?). 🧪🔭 www.swri.org/newsroom/pre...

Pluto’s northern Sputnik Planitia glacier (in the western or left side of Pluto’s brightheart) is shown here in a color mosaic made from New Horizons imagery. The direction of north is shown on the image. The image is ~ 700 x 350 kilometers across. The red box has been added to show most of the region containing dark features attributed to the wetting of the glacier by liquid nitrogen sourced from a “basil melting” process beneath the glacier, as described in the published paper by Stern et al. (2026)

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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

A lot of planning went into the first lunar Earthrise photo in 1966. Humans saw the same view just two years later...and then another year after that, Armstrong & Aldrin set their boots on lunar soil. 🧪🔭 www.planetary.org/space-images...

Geometrical perspective of the first Earth-Moon photo This NASA chart from 1966 shows how this iconic photo was taken. Image: NASA

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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

The historic first Earthrise photo from the Moon was received 60 years ago today. It was shot on film, developed onboard the Lunar Orbiter 1 spacecraft, scanned, transmitted home...and then meticulously restored decades later. 🧪🔭 www.lpi.usra.edu/features/lun...

On August 23, 1966, Lunar Orbiter 1 took the first photo of Earth as seen from lunar orbit. While a remarkable image at the time, the full resolution of the image was never retrieved from the data stored from the mission. In 2008, this earthrise image was restored by the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project at NASA Ames Research Center. They obtained the original data tapes from the mission (the last surviving set) and restored original FR-900 tape drives to operational condition using both 60s era parts and modern electronics.

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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

A big mystery is how life got started without the enzymes essential to modern biology. One idea is that metals + phosphate provided the kick. Bacteria & archaea then developed independent paths to a living cell. Who knows what other life forms didn't make it? 🧪 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Universal ribosomal proteins (tracing to LUCA) are gray in the ribosome structures, bacterial-specific ribosomal proteins are shown in blue, and archaeal-specific ribosomal proteins are shown in red. The schematic tree shows the origin of ribosomal proteins (41, 42) and metabolic proteins (this paper). The line graph shows the average genome size (proteins) per taxon. The distribution of LUCA-, bacteria-, and archaea-specific ribosomal proteins displays a characteristic pattern. Taxa are indicated in the bottom panel.

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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Life may have originated more than once on Earth...and today's living cells might have two separate origins. Fascinating new research traces life's likely beginnings to a hydrothermal vent environment. 🧪 www.hhu.de/en/news/two-...

Mineral-laden water emerging from a hydrothermal vent on the Niua underwater volcano in the Lau Basin, southwest Pacific Ocean. As the water cools, minerals precipitate to form tower-like “chimneys.” Image taken during 2016 cruise “Virtual Vents.”

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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

The mission to rescue NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory has failed; the observatory will probably burn up in Earth's atmosphere later this year. This was a high-risk effort, and will aid future rescue missions. A bitter disappointment all the same. 🔭🧪 www.nasa.gov/news-release...

Shortly after launching on a mission to save NASA’s Swift space telescope, the LINK spacecraft successfully deployed its solar arrays. But the mission has now ended in failure. Credit: Katalyst Space Technologies

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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has taken other spectacular images of solar eclipses as seen from the Moon. But I don't ever recall seeing one with the Moon looming in the foreground, barren and lonely. 🧪 www.nasa.gov/solar-system...

NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter shows the shadow of the Moon cast on the United States during the Aug. 21, 2017, total solar eclipse.
Credits: NASA / Goddard / Arizona State University

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