Billy Keim, a NASA technician, removes a 16-megapixel detector from its shipping container internal fixture as engineer Stephanie Cheung coordinates the activity. NASA's future Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will be fitted with 18 of these infrared detectors, which have now been flight-approved.

The Roman team possesses extra detectors that will be used for other purposes. The team reserved six of the surplus detectors to serve as flight-quality backups and several more for testing. Additional spare detectors may serve as the eyes of other telescopes with more lenient quality requirements.

Roman has delivered four detectors to be used in the 64-megapixel camera in Japan's Prime-focus Infrared Microlensing Experiment (PRIME) telescope, located in the South African Astronomical Observatory in Sutherland. The detectors are contributed as part of an international agreement between NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).

This telescope, which will be commissioned this fall, will hunt for exoplanets—worlds beyond our solar system—using the microlensing method. Roman scientists will use the results of this precursor survey to inform their observing strategy, maximizing the number of planets the mission will find.

Nuclear fusion reactions in the sun are the source of heat and light we receive on Earth. These reactions release a massive amount of cosmic radiation—including X-rays and gamma rays—and charged particles that can be harmful for any living organisms.

Life on Earth has been protected thanks to a magnetic field that forces charged particles to bounce from pole to pole as well as an atmosphere that filters harmful radiation.

During space travel, however, it is a different situation. To find out what happens in a cell when traveling in outer space, scientists are sending baker's yeast to the moon as part of NASA's Artemis 1 mission.

Cosmic damage

Cosmic radiation can damage cell DNA, significantly increasing human risk of neurodegenerative disorders and fatal diseases, like cancer.

NASA's Mars Sample Return Mission is inching closer and closer. The overall mission architecture just hit a new milestone when Perseverance collected the first sample that will be sent back. But what happens once that sample actually gets here? NASA and its partner, ESA, are still working on that, but recently they released a fact sheet that covers what will happen during the first stage of that process—returning to the ground.

That return will take place in the middle of the desert in the western U.S., in an area called the Utah Test and Training Range (UTTR). While this may seem like an obscure place to land such an important mission, it does have several things going for it.

NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft intentionally crashed into Dimorphos, the asteroid moonlet in the double-asteroid system of Didymos, on Monday, 26 September 2022. This was the first planetary defense test in which an impact of a spacecraft attempted to modify the orbit of an asteroid.

Two days after DART's impact, astronomers Teddy Kareta (Lowell Observatory) and Matthew Knight (US Naval Academy) used the 4.1-meter Southern Astrophysical Research (SOAR) Telescope at NSF's NOIRLab's Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile to capture the vast plume of dust and debris blasted from the asteroid's surface. In this new image, the dust trail—the ejecta that has been pushed away by the sun's radiation pressure, not unlike the tail of a comet—can be seen stretching from the center to the right-hand edge of the field of view, which at SOAR is about 3.1 arcminutes using the Goodman High Throughput Spectrograph. At Didymos's distance from Earth at the time of the observation, that would equate to at least 10,000 kilometers (6,000 miles) from the point of impact.