The Sun's atmosphere, or corona, is beaming with activity. Solar flares and coronal mass injections send high-energy particles out into space and the corona constantly releases particles known as the solar wind.

Just as winds on Earth vary, the solar winds departing the Sun travel at different velocities—from a mere 700,000 mph, called slow solar winds, to the fast winds travelling up to 1.7 million mph.

Solar winds interacting with the Earth's atmosphere may interfere with communications, GPS signals, and electrical energy grids.

Beginning March 7, NASA will be ready to launch an experiment called HERSCHEL, or HElium Resonance Scatter in the Corona and HELiosphere. HERSCHEL will study the origin of the slow solar wind, investigate the variation of helium abundance in the corona, and facilitate future investigation of coronal mass ejections and other solar dynamics.

Add one more crater to the long list of pockmarks on the lunar surface.

According to orbital calculations, a rocket hurtling through space for years crashed into the Moon on Friday, but the strike wasn't directly observed, and there might be a wait for photographic evidence.

The impact would have taken place at 7:25 am Eastern Time (1225 GMT), on the far side of the Moon, said the astronomer Bill Gray, who was the first to predict the collision.

Racing through the cosmos at around 5,800 mph (9,300 kph), the roughly four ton object should make a crater "10 or 20 meters across," Gray told AFP.

Its speed, trajectory, and time of impact were calculated using Earth-based telescope observations.

"We had lots (and lots) of tracking data for the object, and there is nothing acting on it except the forces of gravity and sunlight," he said, with the latter pushing the cylinder gently away from the Sun.

Scientists from Washington University in St. Louis are helping to recover gases from a container of lunar soil that astronauts collected and sealed under vacuum on the surface of the moon in 1972. The effort is part of NASA's Apollo Next Generation Sample Analysis (ANGSA) initiative.

Apollo 17 astronauts Harrison Schmitt and Eugene Cernan collected the sample from the site of an ancient landslide in the moon's Taurus-Littrow Valley. The astronauts used a coring device to dig out a column of lunar regolith—a rough mixture of dust, soil and broken rock from the surface of the moon—and sealed it in a container. Back on Earth, NASA carefully placed the container in the lunar vault at NASA's Johnson Space Center, where it has remained in pristine condition, virtually untouched until now.

"For the last 50 years, the lunar core was enclosed in a core sample vacuum container, which was then enclosed in an outer vacuum container," said Alex Meshik, a research professor of physics in Arts & Sciences and faculty fellow of the university's McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences. "They were nested together, almost like Russian dolls.

How can you accurately test a space antenna down here on Earth when it has been scaled up to penetrate the subterranean depths of another planet? This was the question faced by SENER in Spain, currently designing a candidate antenna for ESA's EnVision mission, which will explore Venus from its inner core to outermost cloud layers. To solve it they lifted their prototype skyward with a balloon.

"To develop key technologies for future missions, ESA's Directorate of Technology, Engineering and Quality often explores multiple approaches," explains ESA antenna engineer Paul Moseley.

"This includes parallel prototypes for EnVision's Subsurface Radar Sounder (SRS), which will transmit and receive radio signals to chart the Venusian subsurface. It will achieve this using very low frequencies—9 Mhz—which in turn means its antenna has to be very large, 16 m across.

"To accurately characterize the performance of SENER's current prototype it needs to be tested free of any interaction with its environment, but it is simply too big to fit dedicated test facilities such as ESA's Hertz chamber—which in any case is not equipped to work with such low frequencies.

NASA's On-orbit Servicing, Assembly, and Manufacturing 1 (OSAM-1), a mission that will be the first to robotically refuel a satellite not designed to be serviced, and will also demonstrate assembly and manufacturing technologies and capabilities, has passed its mission critical design review (CDR). This is an important milestone that paves the way for the construction of the spacecraft, payloads, and ground system.

NASA and Maxar Technologies successfully completed the mission CDR in February 2022, less than a year after the same milestone was reached for the mission's spacecraft bus, which focused on the portion of the spacecraft responsible for communications, power, and maneuvering.

The mission review included all elements that will act together as an integrated system:

• Spacecraft bus
• Servicing payload with 16 subsystems including tools, visions systems, and two robotic arms
• Space Infrastructure Dexterous Robot (SPIDER) payload that will manufacture a beam and assemble a communications antenna using a third robotic arm
• Ground system

During the review, NASA engineers and leadership confirmed that the OSAM-1 design is complete and meets specified requirements.

Gazing at the night sky can evoke a sense of wonder regarding humanity's place in the universe. But that's not all it can evoke. If you're knowledgeable about asteroid strikes like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs, then even a fleeting meteorite can nudge aside your enjoyable sense of wonder.