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Space Science News 7 June 2025 - 4 November 2025

Alien Probe or Cosmic Relic? Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS Baffles Scientists (updated 27.10.2025)

Third Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS Stuns Scientists With Surprising Brightening and Blue Glow

Discovery and Interstellar Identity Comet 3I/ATLAS (officially Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS) was first spotted on July 1, 2025, by the NASA-funded ATLAS (Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System) telescope in Río Hurtado, Chile newsweek.com. Right away, its orbit stood out as hyperbolic, meaning it isn’t bound to the Sun by gravity and is just passing through. This identified 3I/ATLAS as an interstellar object – a rare visitor from another star system. It is only the third such interstellar traveler ever detected, after the mysterious cigar-shaped 1I/ʻOumuamua in 2017 and the comet 2I/Borisov in 2019 space.com. The “3I” designation literally means third interstellar,
4 November 2025
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Rare Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS – a 10-Billion-Year-Old Time Capsule – Flies Past Mars

Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS Unleashes Bizarre Sunward Jet as Scientists Quash Alien Rumors Ahead of Solar Swing-By

Interstellar Mystery Lights Up the Solar System An interstellar vagabond is currently streaking through our Solar System, and it’s making waves both in the scientific community and the public imagination. Officially designated 3I/ATLAS (C/2025 N1), this object is only the third interstellar visitor ever observed – a comet from another star now paying us a brief visit ts2.tech. First detected on July 1, 2025 by the ATLAS sky-survey telescope in Chile, 3I/ATLAS immediately stood out: it was moving extremely fast on a one-way hyperbolic trajectory, meaning it is unbound to the Sun and came from far outside our Solar System ts2.tech.
26 October 2025
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Life on Mars? Saturn’s Surprise and More – The Biggest Science Breakthroughs (Sept 21–22, 2025)

Life on Mars? Saturn’s Surprise and More – The Biggest Science Breakthroughs (Sept 21–22, 2025)

Key Facts: Astronomy & Space Webb Hints at Atmosphere on an Earth-Like Exoplanet: Astronomers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope announced intriguing results from the TRAPPIST-1 planetary system. JWST observed the Earth-sized exoplanet TRAPPIST-1e (about 41 light-years away) as it passed in front of its star, and the data “hints that Trappist-1e may have an atmosphere” scitechdaily.com. This planet lies in the star’s temperate habitable zone, where liquid water could exist. If further Webb observations confirm an atmosphere, it would mark the first-ever detection of an atmosphere on a rocky world in a star’s habitable zone scitechdaily.com – a major
22 September 2025
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Possible Life on Mars, ‘Black Hole Stars’ and a Global Diabetes Bombshell – Science News Roundup (Sept 15–16, 2025)

Possible Life on Mars, ‘Black Hole Stars’ and a Global Diabetes Bombshell – Science News Roundup (Sept 15–16, 2025)

NASA Rover Finds Possible Biosignature – Closest Hint Yet of Life on Mars In a sensational development for astrobiology, NASA announced that Perseverance has collected a Mars rock sample that “could preserve evidence of ancient microbial life” nasa.gov. The rover drilled the sample, nicknamed “Sapphire Canyon,” from an ancient riverbed formation rich in clay – exactly the kind of environment that on Earth traps and preserves organic remains nasa.gov nasa.gov. Inside the rock, scientists detected certain organic molecules and chemical patterns that are considered potential biosignatures, meaning they might be remnants of past life (though not yet proof of it)
16 September 2025
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Marsquake Data Uncovers “Lumpy” Martian Interior Shaped by Ancient Impacts

Marsquake Data Uncovers “Lumpy” Martian Interior Shaped by Ancient Impacts

Key Facts Artist’s cutaway illustration of Mars showing debris from ancient impacts (bright fragments) scattered through the mantle. Seismic waves from a meteoroid impact (left) travel through this lumpy interior before being detected by NASA’s InSight lander (right) on the surface watchers.news watchers.news. Probing Mars’ Interior: InSight Mission Background NASA’s InSight (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) mission was the first to directly measure the Red Planet’s “vital signs” – its seismic activity, internal structure, and heat flow. Landing in 2018, InSight deployed the first seismometer on Mars, and over four years it detected 1,319 marsquakes before
29 August 2025
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Meet “Ammonite” – Fossil World at Solar System’s Edge Challenges Planet Nine Theory

Meet “Ammonite” – Fossil World at Solar System’s Edge Challenges Planet Nine Theory

Ammonite is the informal name for the trans-Neptunian object 2023 KQ14, discovered by the FOSSIL survey with Subaru’s 8.2-meter telescope in early 2023. Follow-up observations in July 2024 with the Canada–France–Hawaii Telescope and archival data from 2005 extended its observational arc to 19 years. Ammonite is a sednoid, a distant trans-Neptunian object with a highly eccentric orbit (e ≈ 0.74) and a diameter estimated at 220–380 km. Its orbital direction is markedly different from the three previously known sednoids, breaking their apparent clustering. Backward and forward simulations show Ammonite has been on a stable solar orbit for at least 4.5
17 July 2025
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Space Science in July 2025: Breakthroughs, Setbacks, and the Expanding Frontier / Updated: 2025, July 4th, 00:00 CET

Space Science in July 2025: Breakthroughs, Setbacks, and the Expanding Frontier / Updated: 2025, July 4th, 00:00 CET

Astronomers confirmed 3I/ATLAS (C/2025 N1) as the third confirmed interstellar object to visit our solar system, about 20 km wide, detected by NASA’s ATLAS survey, and it will pass inside Mars’ orbit in October 2025 at a minimum distance of 1.6 AU. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope directly imaged exoplanet TWA 7 b, a Saturn-mass world 34 light-years away, making it the lightest planet ever directly imaged and potentially habitable. MethaneSAT, an $88 million methane-emissions satellite backed by Jeff Bezos, Google, and the Environmental Defense Fund, launched in March 2024 and lost contact after just over a year, deemed unlikely
4 July 2025
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3I/ATLAS: The Fastest Interstellar Comet Ever—Here’s What Scientists Are Saying

3I/ATLAS: The Fastest Interstellar Comet Ever—Here’s What Scientists Are Saying

3I/ATLAS (C/2025 N1) is the third identified interstellar object, discovered on 1 July 2025 by the ATLAS telescope in Chile. It is on an extremely hyperbolic trajectory with a velocity of about 68 km/s and will reach perihelion on 29 October 2025 at 1.36 au, inside Mars’s orbit. It poses no threat to Earth. Early images show a faint coma and a short 3-arcsecond tail, confirming cometary activity. Detected at 4.5 au from the Sun months before perihelion, it offers an unprecedented window to study its composition, rotation, and size. The hyperbolic excess velocity v∞ is 57 km/s, making 3I/ATLAS
3 July 2025
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Jupiter Unveiled: Surprising Secrets of the Giant Planet and Its 95 Moons

Jupiter Unveiled: Surprising Secrets of the Giant Planet and Its 95 Moons

Jupiter is the Solar System’s largest planet, about 318 Earth masses, with a rotation period of roughly 9.9 hours per day. It is composed mainly of hydrogen and helium, with a metallic hydrogen layer that powers a strong magnetic field via a dynamo. The Great Red Spot is a storm at least 300–350 years old, about twice Earth’s diameter, whose roots extend roughly 300 miles (500 km) into the atmosphere. Jupiter’s magnetosphere extends 1–3 million kilometers toward the Sun and a tail over 600 million kilometers long, with a field 14–54 times stronger than Earth’s and new radiation zones near
20 June 2025
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Cosmic Time Machine: The Jaw-Dropping Science Unleashed by the James Webb Space Telescope

Cosmic Time Machine: The Jaw-Dropping Science Unleashed by the James Webb Space Telescope

JWST launched on December 25, 2021, aboard an ESA Ariane 5 rocket to the Sun-Earth L2 point, reaching about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth in January 2022. Its 6.5-meter segmented gold-coated beryllium primary mirror consists of 18 hexagonal segments, each about 1.32 meters across and roughly 20 kilograms, designed to fold for launch. JWST uses a five-layer Kapton sunshield measuring roughly 21 by 14 meters to keep the optics around 40 kelvin, while the MIRI instrument operates at about 7 kelvin with a dedicated cryocooler. JWST carries four main instruments: NIRCam (0.6-5 μm; 4-megapixel arrays and wavefront sensing), NIRSpec (0.6-5
7 June 2025
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Sky Scanners: How SAR Imaging Satellites Are Redefining Earth Observation

Sky Scanners: How SAR Imaging Satellites Are Redefining Earth Observation

About 75% of the planet is obscured by cloud cover or darkness at any moment, making optical imaging inaccessible. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellites actively illuminate the ground with microwave radar and synthesize a large aperture by moving the antenna to produce high-resolution images. SAR can operate day or night and in all weather, providing 24/7 imaging. Sentinel-1 (ESA) comprises satellites Sentinel-1A launched in 2014 and Sentinel-1B in 2016, with C-band SAR offering ~5 m resolution in high-resolution modes and 250–400 km swaths, and a 12-day revisit. RADARSAT-2 (Canada) launched in 2007, followed by the RADARSAT Constellation Mission (RCM) in
7 June 2025
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