Bound for a metal-rich asteroid of the same name, the Psyche mission is targeting Oct. 5 to launch from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The spacecraft's solar arrays are folded like an envelope into their stowed position. Xenon gas—fuel for the journey to the asteroid belt—is loaded.

When the first astronauts land on Mars, they may have the descendants of a microwave-oven-size device to thank for the air they breathe and the rocket propellant that gets them home. That device, called MOXIE (Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment), has generated oxygen for the 16th and final time aboard NASA's Perseverance rover.

The safe landing of the probe is one of the most difficult challenges in Mars exploration, and the Mars supersonic parachute is extremely important for this process. To date, all the successful Mars exploration missions have used disk-gap-band (DGB) parachutes. However, the DGB parachute with the highest diameter of 21.35 m cannot be further used for future Mars exploration missions with higher loads.

Next-generation supersonic parachutes conducted by NASA, such as disksail parachutes, are alternatives to DGB parachutes. Disksail parachutes have larger porous gaps and smaller porous seams on the canopy surface than DGB parachutes. However, there are few studies on the aerodynamic characteristics of supersonic parachutes with different geometric porosity structures and locations.

Hence, the influence mechanism of porous seams or gaps and their locations on the performance of supersonic parachute systems in Martian atmospheric conditions remains unclear.

Avi Loeb, an astrophysicist at Harvard University in the US, has published a press release claiming that some of the 700 or so spherical metallic fragments (spherules) he recovered from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, just off the coast of Papua New Guinea, are from beyond the solar system.

The discovery was quite interesting because, although such spherules are distributed globally, it is not easy to recover them from the depths of the ocean bed—requiring a dredging operation with a powerful magnet. But Loeb has speculated that the spherules may be related to the passage of an interstellar meteor, IM1, which burned up over the South Pacific Ocean in January, 2014. He has even hypothesized that the spherules are actually debris from an alien spacecraft. I commented at the time that I'd need firm analytical evidence to accept such interpretations.

Loeb has now provided a very detailed set of analytical data of 57 spherules in an article submitted to a journal.