Moon lander is lost on second bid at touchdown by Tokyo-based company
As scientists search for worlds that may be habitable for life, they've discovered a type that is common in the universe — but doesn't exist in our own solar system.
These enigmatic planets are called sub-Neptunes, which are larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune.
An April study catapulted one such world, named K2-18b, into the spotlight. Astronomers at the University of Cambridge claimed they detected molecules in the planet's atmosphere that might be biosignatures — markers of biological activity that could hint at past or present life.
Now, other groups of astronomers have looked at the same data and disagree with the findings, saying there is more to the story.
The twists and turns in the ongoing conversation around planet K2-18b showcase why the search for evidence of life beyond Earth is so difficult.
Indeed, persistence is everything when it comes to space investigation. 'Never quit the lunar quest' was the motto underpinning a high-stakes mission that aimed to touch down on the moon Thursday. But Tokyo-based Ispace lost contact with its vehicle at the time it should have landed.
The Resilience spacecraft was Ispace's second bid at a soft lunar landing. The company's previous try with the Hakuto-R lunar lander crashed into the moon in April 2023.
'This is our second failure, and about these results, we have to really take it seriously,' said Ispace CEO Takeshi Hakamada of the nail-biting attempt. Ispace has its work cut out for it, but it isn't giving up.
New research combining artificial intelligence with radiocarbon dating is changing the way scholars think about the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Bedouin shepherds first spotted the scrolls in 1947 within a cave in the Judaean Desert. Archaeologists then recovered thousands of scroll fragments, including the oldest copies of the Hebrew Bible, from 11 caves near the site of Khirbat Qumran.
'They completely changed the way we think about ancient Judaism and early Christianity,' said lead study author Mladen Popović, a dean at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.
Scholars thought the roughly 1,000 manuscripts, written mostly on parchment and papyrus, ranged from the third century BC to the second century AD. But some of the scrolls, which serve as a crucial intellectual time capsule, could be much older, the new analysis suggests.
A World War I-era submarine was lost at sea off California's coast nearly 108 years ago, killing 19 crew members. Now, researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution have captured never-before-seen deep-sea imagery of the wreckage.
The plague pandemic known as the Black Death killed at least 25 million people across medieval Europe over five years.
The culprit behind the disease is a bacterium called Yersinia pestis, which has led to three major plague outbreaks since the first century AD — and it still exists today.
How has the plague persisted for centuries? Changes to one gene in the bacterium created new, less deadly strains that kept hosts alive longer so it could keep spreading.
The weaker strains have since gone extinct, according to new research. But the findings could yield key clues to help scientists manage the current bacterium's dominant lineage, which is of the deadlier variety.
If you've ever walked through a fruit orchard, you might have been steps away from a living tower of worms.
That's what researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and the University of Konstanz in Germany found when they inspected rotten pears and apples.
Hundreds of the microscopic worms, called nematodes, climbed on top of one another to form structures 10 times their size — even making a twisting 'arm' to sense the environment — leading scientists to question what's driving the behavior.
'What we got was more than just some worms standing on top of each other,' said senior study author Serena Ding, a Max Planck research group leader of genes and behavior. 'It's a coordinated superorganism, acting and moving as a whole.'
These stories will pique your curiosity:
— For over a century, astronomers thought the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies would collide in 4.5 billion years, but new telescope observations may change that. However, another galaxy could entangle with ours sooner.
— Archaeologists who uncovered the remains of an ancient Mayan complex in Guatemala named the site after two humanlike rock figures that are believed to represent an 'ancestral couple,' according to the country's Ministry of Culture and Sport.
— A fossil of the earliest known bird that was kept in a private collection for decades has provided scientists with 'one 'Wow!' after another,' including the first flight feathers seen in an Archaeopteryx specimen, said Dr. Jingmai O'Connor, associate curator of fossil reptiles at the Field Museum.
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Zombie fungus-infected fly that likely lived among dinosaurs is preserved in amber
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Is the US forfeiting its Red Planet leadership to China's Mars Sample Return plan?
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This drone, outfitted with an arm, is to be deployed for rock sampling at locations greater than 300 feet (over 100 meters) from the lander. Just how impactful their potential success could be is now under discussion within the U.S. Given the value of Mars samples, not just for science but also to bolster plans for future crewed missions to Mars, robotic return of bits and pieces of the planet is seen by many as mandatory. China's final pick of a landing zone will rely on a review of 86 preliminary landing sites. The chosen site will favor the emergence and preservation of evidence of traces of life and detection of potential biosignatures in the returned samples, according to a recent paper published in the journal Nature Astronomy. "The mission aims to provide insights into nine scientific themes centered around the main focus of the search for extant and past life on Mars," explains lead author, Zengqian Hou of the Institute of Deep Space Sciences, Deep Space Exploration Laboratory, in Hefei, China. Zengqian and colleagues have outlined where to collect, what to collect, how to collect, and how to analyze those precious Mars selections. "Collecting samples from Mars could provide accurate data on the signs of life," the research team explains. Yiliang Li, a co-author of the Nature Astronomy paper, is an astrobiologist in the Earth sciences division at the University of Hong Kong (HKU). His role mainly involves leading an HKU group that is working on the selection of the landing site for the Tianwen-3 MSR mission. According to an HKU statement, prime exploratory regions on Mars are those where liquid water was likely present in the planet's early history, areas rich in essential metallic nutrients, and sites where traces of Martian microbial activity could potentially be preserved for billions of years. In the meantime, the search for promising sampling sites on Mars "remains an ongoing and active endeavor," the HKU statement adds. Here in the United States, the White House released President Trump's 2026 Discretionary Funding Request that calls for ending financially unsustainable programs - including Mars Sample Return. "In line with the Administration's objectives of returning to the Moon before China and putting a man on Mars, the Budget would reduce lower priority research and terminate unaffordable missions such as the Mars Sample Return mission that is grossly overbudget and whose goals would be achieved by human missions to Mars," the document says. Indeed, over multiple years and multiple reviews of the joint NASA/European Space Agency MSR project there is a sticker-shock price tag; a last estimate was about $11 billion, with samples being returned to Earth in 2040. MSR's mission cost was deemed too costly and would not be achieved on an acceptable time period by NASA's last, non-acting Administrator, Bill Nelson. While techno-squabbles over MSR have been on-going, NASA's Perseverance Mars rover has been doggedly on the hunt within Jezero Crater. Since its touchdown in February 2021, the car-sized robot has been obediently gathering rock samples across the martian landscape. Some of those sealed specimens may well contain signs of past life on the Red Planet, and are deemed rocket-ready for pick-up and delivery to Earth. The White House shutdown of the NASA/ESA MSR venture via the Trump budget "forfeits Mars Sample Return to China," declares a recent episode of the popular Mars Guy program, created by Steve Ruff, a leading planetary geologist at Arizona State University (ASU) in Tempe. The President's budget forfeits the highest priority planetary science goal of MSR to China, but only if the US Congress agrees, Ruff notes. In the interim, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, unveiled in early June his legislative directives for Senate Republicans' budget reconciliation bill, shaped to beat China to Mars and the Moon. It dedicates almost $10 billion to win the new space race with China and ensure America dominates space by making, for one, targeted, critical investments in Mars-forward technology. In the lawmaker's directive, Cruz calls for a Mars Telecommunications Orbiter, pegging $700 million for the commercial procurement of the dual-use orbiter. Its assignment is to handle both a Mars Sample Return mission to return core samples of Mars to Earth, as well as future human Mars missions. But if China is on the MSR march to the Red Planet and NASA isn't, what about China returning already prime pre-selected specimens picked up by NASA's Perseverance Rover still busily at work within Jezero Crater? "China's mission probably won't have access to comparably compelling samples as those collected by Perseverance because of engineering constraints that limit where it can land and the limited mobility options it will have," Ruff explains. "I know from regular comments on my YouTube channel for Mars Guy that there's a commonly held view that the Chinese can or will pick up the samples in Jezero crater. But this simply can't happen given the engineering constraints of their Mars sample return mission as publicly presented. That mission will have neither the landing precision nor mobility on the surface to get to either the sample depot or to Perseverance," Ruff told "So China is not going to save the NASA/ESA MSR mission." On the other hand, China's Zengqian and colleagues state that exploration of Mars is a collective endeavor for all of humanity, writing in Nature Astronomy: "The Tianwen-3 mission is committed to win–win cooperation, harmonious coexistence and shared prosperity through international cooperation. It actively seeks international partnerships through various channels and at various levels for joint scientific research, landing site selection and scientific payload development and testing." Cooperation on MSR between the US and China, however, seems a bit of a dice roll, said Barry E. DiGregorio, founder and director of the International Committee Against Mars Sample Return based in Burlington, Ontario, Canada. While China is inviting international cooperation, recent debates on tariffs between the two nations would seem to make the proposition difficult to hammer out. "Now is the time to consider other options such as sending in-situ life detection instruments to Mars to settle the issue of extant life," DiGregorio told "We need to be sure what the next phase of Mars missions will be. With the continued push to get humans to Mars, astronaut safety should now take priority and that means making sure of biosafety concerns with any indigenous life forms that might be found," said DiGregorio. While China is poised to become the first country to return potentially biologically active planetary material — including potential life forms — from beyond Earth, "the potential risk such substances might pose to terrestrial life, including humans, is a major concern," points out Yiliang at the University of Hong Kong. To arrest that anxiety China plans to construct a specialized MSR facility on the outskirts of Hefei, the capital of Anhui, China. Within that facility, freshly-returned samples from Mars would undergo comprehensive biochemical and pathological testing under strict isolation from the Earth's environment. "Only after it is conclusively determined that the samples contain no active biological agents or substances that could threaten the Earth's biosphere will they be released to designated laboratories for in-depth scientific analysis," concludes the University of Hong Kong statement. The prospect of plucked collectibles to Earth for close-up inspection in state-of-the-art facilities is now literally "up for grabs" — but by what nation? As voiced in a June 23 draft of candidate findings, statements of support/concern by the Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group (MEPAG), a community-based, interdisciplinary forum: "Ambitious, first-of-their-kind missions like MSR come with challenges but NASA's history of success in difficult endeavors is what makes the US the international leader in deep space exploration," the document states. "Returning the scientifically selected samples that await us on Mars, as part of a balanced portfolio, will help to ensure the US does not cede leadership in deep space to other nations, such as China."
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NASA discovers new planet using James Webb Telescope
The Brief NASA has discovered a new planet beyond our solar system. NASA's James Webb Space Telescope recently captured evidence of the new planet using heat. The new exoplanet has been named TWA 7b and orbits the young nearby star TWA 7. NASA has made a new out of this world discovery. NASA's James Webb Space Telescope recently captured evidence of a new planet beyond our solar system. The documentation represents Webb's first direct image discovery of a planet, and the lightest planet ever seen with this technique. What we know NASA's telescope was recently able to detect the exoplanet, which has been named TWA 7b. The new object orbits the young nearby star TWA 7. The telescope was able to detect the planet using heat. NASA officials said that usually planets of this size outside our solar system are difficult to detect, but scientists used a technique called high-contrast imaging to detect the exoplanet. Scientists believe the exoplanet is around the mass of Saturn and is about 50 times the distance of Earth from the sun. TWA 7b is about 111 light-years away from Earth. NASA says initial analysis suggests that the object could be a "young, cold planet with a mass around 0.3 times that of Jupiter (about 100 Earth masses)." What's next Now that scientists have discovered the planet, researchers say this is just the beginning of new discoveries. NASA wants to better understand the object's properties and how the planet formed, which could also help researchers learn more about Earth. CLICK TO DOWNLOAD THE FOX LOCAL APP What they're saying "Our observations reveal a strong candidate for a planet shaping the structure of the TWA 7 debris disc, and its position is exactly where we expected to find a planet of this mass," said Dr. Anne-Marie Lagrange. "This observatory enables us to capture images of planets with masses similar to those in the solar system, which represents an exciting step forward in our understanding of planetary systems, including our own," said co-author Mathilde Malin of Johns Hopkins University and the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. SIGN-UP FOR FOX 35'S BREAKING NEWS, DAILY NEWS NEWSLETTERS Dig deeper The first time scientists discovered an exoplanet was in 1992. NASA says an exoplanet is any planet beyond our solar system. Most exoplanets orbit other stars, but some free-floating exoplanets, called rogue planets, are untethered to any star. NASA has confirmed more than 5,800 exoplanets out of the billions that scientists believe exist. However, none of them are known to be habitable. The Source This story was written based on information gathered from NASA and the ESA Webb Telescope, as well as information collected by FOX 35's Esther Bower in interviews with space experts and scientists.
