A drag sail that a team at Purdue University developed to pull launch vehicles in space back to Earth is scheduled to undergo a test launch on Thursday (Sept. 2).

The mission, set to take off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, will evaluate how well the prototype helps its vehicle deorbit from space after mission completion. A livestream of the launch will be available through Everyday Astronaut.

Faster deorbiting times may prevent spacecraft and launch vehicles from turning into hazardous space debris as they wait to deorbit naturally, a process that could take days, months or years without assistance. Abandoned, lost or post-mission space vehicles are part of the more than nine thousand tons of space debris currently traveling through Earth's lower orbit at dangerous speeds.

The asteroid Vesta is the second largest asteroid in our Solar System. With a diameter of about 330 miles, it orbits the sun between the planets Mars and Jupiter.

Asteroids have long played a part in building popular fascination with space. "Marooned off Vesta" was the first story published by American writer Isaac Asimov, the third story he wrote, appearing in the March 1939 issue of the science fiction magazine Amazing Stories.

"When we think of asteroid belts, we probably picture Han Solo maneuvering the millennium falcon through a dense set of irregularly shaped gray rocks in space," Christian Klimczak, associate professor in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences department of geology. "While most rocks are indeed irregularly shaped and gray, they are far apart and NASA's Dawn spacecraft did not have to maneuver around any other asteroids to reach and explore Vesta."

Dawn was the space probe launched by NASA in September 2007 with the mission of studying two of the three known protoplanets of the asteroid belt, Vesta and Ceres.

Vesta, like Earth, is composed of rock in its crust and mantle, and it has an iron core.

By taking advantage of a natural lens in space, astronomers have captured an unprecedented look at X-rays from a black hole system in the early universe.

This magnifying glass was used to sharpen X-ray images for the first time using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. It captured details about black holes that would normally be too distant to study using existing X-ray telescopes.

Astronomers applied a phenomenon known as "gravitational lensing" that occurs when the path taken by light from distant objects is bent by a large concentration of mass, such as a galaxy, that lies along the line of sight. This lensing can magnify and amplify the light by large amounts and create duplicate images of the same object. The configuration of these duplicate images can be used to decipher the complexity of the object and sharpen images.

The gravitationally-lensed system in the new study is called MG B2016+112.

As scientists prepare for crewed research missions to nearby planets and moons, they've identified a need for something beyond rovers and rockets.

They need accurate weather forecasts. Without them, any trip to the surface may be one duststorm away from disaster.

A new Yale study helps lay the foundation for more accurate, otherworldly forecasts by taking a phenomenon related to Earth's jet stream and applying it to weather patterns on Mars and Titan, Saturn's largest moon. The study appears in the journal Nature Astronomy.

"I believe the first accurate forecasts of perhaps a few Mars days may be only a decade away," said lead author J. Michael Battalio, a postdoctoral researcher in Earth and planetary sciences in Yale's Faculty of Arts and Sciences. "It is just a matter of combining better observational datasets with sufficiently refined numerical models.

"But until then, we can rely upon connections between the climate and weather to help anticipate dust storms."

On Earth, the regularity of storm systems in the middle latitudes is associated with what is called an annular mode—a variability in atmospheric flow that is unrelated to the cycle of seasons.