With the accelerated advancement of lunar and Mars exploration programs, long-term human habitation on extraterrestrial bodies faces the severe challenge of extreme diurnal temperature variations. Phase change materials (PCMs), owing to their ability to store or release substantial latent heat during solid–liquid phase transitions while maintaining a nearly constant temperature, have become an ideal solution for space thermal control systems. However, in the microgravity environment of space, the ground-dominant natural convection tends to disappear, and thermocapillary convection may become the prevailing heat transfer mechanism; in low-gravity environments such as those on the Moon and Mars, the coexistence and competition between these two convective regimes remain unclear. Existing studies have predominantly focused on either Earth's gravity or pure microgravity conditions, with a notable scarcity of research on the coupled effects of thermocapillary and natural convection at intermediate gravity levels. The melting dynamics of two typical organic PCMs, succinonitrile and n-octadecane, under low-gravity conditions have not yet been systematically elucidated. Therefore, clarifying the roles of thermocapillary convection under varying gravity levels and container geometries holds significant engineering guidance for the design of efficient space thermal control systems.

Roman Space Telescope, Launch Date: The NASA Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is scheduled for launch on 30 August 2026 from Kennedy Space Center on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket to study the universe's history and dark matter and energy as well as exoplanets.

MPIA Heidelberg Contribution: The Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) in Heidelberg played a key role in developing the Coronagraph Instrument (CGI), including designing, manufacturing, and testing its Precision Alignment Mechanisms (PAMs).

Scientific Goals: CGI aims to observe older, cooler gas giants closer to their stars than previously possible and analyze their atmospheres with an integrated spectrograph.

Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology developed DCA2MC, a divide-and-conquer approach for model checking linear temporal properties. The method splits large verification problems into smaller, independently checkable tasks to address state-space explosion and improve performance through parallelization. A supporting tool is implemented in Maude and provides an environment integrating with external model checkers such as Spin, while a semi-automated method helps select effective layer configurations. Case studies demonstrated improved verification of larger state spaces.

Planets form from disks of gas and dust around young stars, but the gas needed for growth does not last forever. New observations from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) now offer a new view of how this gas escapes and how the process changes as young planetary systems develop.

The research, led by Naman Bajaj from the University of Arizona and co-authored by SETI Institute scientist Uma Gorti, looked at 72 young, Sun-like stars and their protoplanetary disks. This is one of the largest planet-formation studies using JWST. The findings show that different types of winds are more important at different stages in a planetary system’s early life.

The results have been published in The Astronomical Journal (https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-3881/ae9089)

“What is exciting about this study is that we can now see, across a large sample of young systems, how the mechanisms that remove gas from planet-forming disks change with time. Disk dispersal sets a fundamental clock for planet formation: once the gas is gone, the opportunity to build gas-rich planets is essentially over,” said Gorti.

AnalySwift LLC, a Purdue University-affiliated company, has received an $899,738 Phase II STTR (Small Business Technology Transfer) award from NASA for a two-year activity to develop a solution: a robotic technology that welds and unwelds thermoplastic composites in space.

With the increasingly urgent demand for non-toxic, high-specific-impulse propellants in space propulsion systems, ammonium dinitramide (ADN)-based liquid propellants have attracted extensive attention as a new-generation green alternative to hydrazine-based fuels. However, existing ADN-based thrusters all adopt the catalytic ignition technology route, which suffers from inherent drawbacks: the catalyst cannot withstand temperatures exceeding 1500 K, long preheating times are required prior to startup (in the Prisma mission, in-flight preheating lasted 600–720 s with a single-event energy consumption of 25 kJ), and insufficient preheating may lead to "hard start" or even explosion—these issues severely constrain the rapid response capability and operational safety of the thrusters. Although active ignition methods such as resistive ignition and laser ignition have been validated at the single-droplet level, how to achieve catalyst-free electric ignition at the thruster system level and systematically evaluate its combustion characteristics remains a critical engineering problem urgently to be addressed in the field of green space propulsion.

Magnetic skyrmions are nanoscale spin textures that can behave like particles and move and diffuse in real space. This makes them promising information carriers for future memory and computing technologies. A new computational study in npj Spintronics shows how geometry and topology can guide asymmetric thermal diffusion of magnetic skyrmions, offering insights for unlocking unconventional computing paradigms, including future stochastic and neuromorphic computing devices for more efficient artificial intelligence (AI) applications.

A team of researchers found a naked photo-bombing comet in an image from publicly available archival data from the Subaru Telescope. The Subaru Telescope has produced a vast collection of publicly available images covering large areas of the sky. Although these observations were originally designed for other scientific goals, the images can also contain unexpected Solar System objects, making the archive a valuable resource for new discoveries. By analyzing how sunlight is reflected from the surface of the nucleus, the team was able to determine important similarities and differences between the comet and asteroids.