NASA has chosen the first science instruments designed for astronauts to deploy on the surface of the moon during Artemis III. Once installed near the lunar South Pole, the three instruments will collect valuable scientific data about the lunar environment, the lunar interior, and how to sustain a long-duration human presence on the moon, which will help prepare NASA to send astronauts to Mars.

"Artemis marks a bold new era of exploration, where human presence amplifies scientific discovery. With these innovative instruments stationed on the moon's surface, we're embarking on a transformative journey that will kick-start the ability to conduct human-machine teaming—an entirely new way of doing science," said NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy.

"These three deployed instruments were chosen to begin scientific investigations that will address key moon to Mars science objectives."

The instruments will address three Artemis science objectives: understanding planetary processes, understanding the character and origin of lunar polar volatiles, and investigating and mitigating exploration risks.

In less than six months, NASA is set to launch Europa Clipper on a 1.6-billion-mile (2.6-billion-kilometer) voyage to Jupiter's ocean moon Europa. From the wild vibrations of the rocket ride to the intense heat and cold of space to the punishing radiation of Jupiter, it will be a journey of extremes. The spacecraft was recently put through a series of hard-core tests at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California to ensure it's up to the challenge.

The Wide-field Imager for Parker Solar Probe (WISPR) Science Team, led by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), captured the development of turbulence as a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) interacted with the ambient solar wind in the circumsolar space. This discovery is reported in the Astrophysical Journal.

Taking advantage of its unique location inside the sun's atmosphere, the NRL-built WISPR telescope on NASA's Parker Solar Probe (PSP) mission, operated by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHUAPL), captured in unparalleled detail the interaction between a CME and the background ambient solar wind.

To the surprise of the WISPR team, images from one of the telescopes showed what seemed like turbulent eddies, so-called Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities (KHI). Such structures have been imaged in the terrestrial atmosphere as trains of crescent wave-like clouds and are the results of strong wind shear between the upper and lower levels of the cloud.