A team of researchers, including those at the University of Tokyo, discovered that liquid water once flowed on the asteroid that spawned near-Earth asteroid Ryugu more than a billion years after it first formed. The finding, based on tiny rock fragments returned by the Hayabusa2 spacecraft of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), overturns long-held assumptions that water activity on asteroids only occurred in the earliest moments of solar system history. This could impact models which include the formation of the Earth.

Researchers including those from the University of Tokyo have successfully grown large tomatoes and cherry tomatoes, both rich in nutrients, in tightly controlled environments where the light source was energy-efficient LEDs. Such methods were often limited by the types or sizes of plants that could thrive in such conditions. This feasibility study demonstrates the researchers’ method is suitable for urban environments, potentially even in space, and can offer food security in the face of climate change or extreme weather conditions.

Public confidence in U.S. health and science agencies has dropped since the inauguration of President Donald Trump, according to a new survey by the Annenberg Public Policy Center. The survey also finds that most Americans lack confidence that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is providing the public with trustworthy information on matters of public health.

Astronomers using observatories around the world, including the Gemini South telescope, the SOAR telescope and the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope funded in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation and operated by NSF NOIRLab, have found that the asteroid 1998 KY26 is almost three times smaller and spinning much faster than previously thought. The asteroid is the 2031 target for Japan’s Hayabusa2 extended mission, and the new observations offer key information for the mission’s operations.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), in partnership with and with funding support from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Northrop Grumman’s SpaceLogistics, has reached a historic milestone in satellite servicing technology, completing on Sept. 5 a critical round of space-readiness testing on a robotic spacecraft designed to extend and upgrade satellites already in orbit.

In our nearby stellar neighborhood, a burned-out star is snacking on a fragment of a Pluto-like object. With its unique ultraviolet capability, only NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope could identify that this meal is taking place.

The stellar remnant is a white dwarf about half the mass of our Sun, but that is densely packed into a body about the size of Earth. Scientists think the dwarf’s immense gravity pulled in and tore apart an icy Pluto analog from the system’s own version of the Kuiper Belt, an icy ring of debris that encircles our solar system. The findings were reported on September 18 in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.