| In this week’s newsletter, discover NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope’s detailed plans for a major survey that will reveal our home galaxy, the Milky Way, in unprecedented detail; explore new images captured by the Parker Solar Probe during its record-breaking closest approach to the Sun in December 2024; and hear former International Space Station program manager and Axiom Space co-founder Michael Suffredini reflect on the ambitious path to building the International Space Station and the lessons learned. Plus, more stories you might have missed. |
| The team behind NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope has released detailed plans for a major survey that will reveal our home galaxy, the Milky Way, in unprecedented detail. In one month of observations spread across two years, the survey will unveil tens of billions of stars and explore previously uncharted structures. “The Galactic Plane Survey will revolutionize our understanding of the Milky Way,” said Julie McEnery, Roman’s senior project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “We’ll be able to explore the mysterious far side of our galaxy and its star-studded heart. Because of the survey’s breadth and depth, it will be a scientific mother lode.” The survey will cover nearly 700 square degrees along the glowing band of the Milky Way—our edge-on view of the disk-shaped structure containing most of our galaxy’s stars, gas, and dust. Scientists expect the survey to map up to 20 billion stars and detect tiny shifts in their positions with repeated high-resolution observations, and it will only take 29 days spread over the course of the mission’s first two years. ROMAN’S GALACTIC PLANE SURVEY |
 | THE UNIVERSE Chart-Topping Supernova The James Webb Space Telescope has observed a supernova that exploded when the universe was only 730 million years old — the earliest detection of its kind to date. Webb’s crisp near-infrared images also allowed astronomers to locate the supernova’s faint host galaxy. FIRST LOOK |
| THE SOLAR SYSTEM Solar Observations With help from the Parker Solar Probe, astronomers have made the first continuous, two-dimensional maps of the outer edge of the Sun’s atmosphere. At this boundary, solar material escapes from the Sun to become the solar wind, a million-mile-per-hour stream of particles that flows outward in all directions across the solar system, striking planets, spacecraft, and anything else in its way. Knowing exactly where this critical boundary is could help scientists understand how solar activity impacts life on Earth and our technology. THE BOUNDARY OF THE SUN |  |
 THE UNIVERSE Broiling Lava World Researchers using the James Webb Space Telescope have detected the strongest evidence yet for an atmosphere on a rocky planet outside our solar system. Observations of the ultra-hot super-Earth TOI-561 b suggest that the exoplanet is surrounded by a thick blanket of gases above a global magma ocean. The results help explain the planet’s unusually low density and challenge the prevailing wisdom that relatively small planets so close to their stars are not able to sustain atmospheres. LEARN MORE |  THE SOLAR SYSTEM Solar Recycling Images captured by the Parker Solar Probe during its record-breaking closest approach to the Sun in December 2024 have revealed fresh insights into how solar magnetic fields responsible for space weather escape from the Sun—and why, at times, they remain trapped.LEARN MORE |
| More NASA News |
 | NASA astronaut Jonny Kim returned to Earth on Tuesday alongside Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Alexey Zubritsky, wrapping up an eight-month science mission aboard the International Space Station. The crew made a safe, parachute-assisted landing at 12:03 a.m. EST, southeast of Dzhezkazgan, Kazakhstan, after departing the space station at 8:41 p.m. EST on Dec. 8 aboard the Soyuz MS-27 spacecraft. |
 | Cradled in the nose of a high-altitude research airplane, a new NASA sensor has taken to the skies to help geoscientists map rocks hosting lithium and other critical minerals on Earth’s surface some 60,000 feet below. |
 | Astronomers have been poring over a flood of data from NASA satellites and other facilities as they try to work out what was responsible for an extraordinary cosmic outburst discovered on July 2. The event was a gamma‑ray burst—the most powerful class of cosmic explosions—yet unlike typical gamma‑ray bursts that fade within a minute, this one continued for days. |
 | Using data from more than 1,600 galaxies gathered over two decades by the Chandra X‑ray Observatory, a team of astronomers has found evidence that many smaller galaxies may lack central supermassive black holes. The finding challenges the common idea that nearly every galaxy hosts one of these giant black holes within its core. |
 | In the latest episode of Houston We Have a Podcast, former International Space Station program manager and Axiom Space co-founder Michael Suffredini reflects on the ambitious path to building the space station and the lessons learned from a decade of leadership. |
| ARTEMIS The Science of Lunar Landings Before we return astronauts to the Moon through Artemis, NASA is studying how a lander exhaust can interact with the lunar surface, especially regolith, as it lands and takes off. At NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, engineers have begun a series of tests to study how lander engine exhaust kicks up lunar dust, soil, and rocks. This critical data will inform systems to protect crews, landers, and nearby science instruments during future Artemis missions. The data will also be used by the agency’s commercial partners as they develop human landing systems to safely transport astronauts from lunar orbit to the Moon’s surface and back, beginning with Artemis III.LEARN MORE |  |
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| As Artemis scientists and engineers plan out the instruments and tools astronauts will use to study rocks and soil in the Moon’s south polar region during the Artemis III mission, it’s worth looking back to this day 53 years ago. On December 12, 1972, the final two Apollo astronauts to set foot on the Moon stepped out of the Apollo 17 lunar module and began exploring the lunar surface. Among them was the first—and still the only—trained geologist ever to set foot on the Moon. |
| What was his name? A. Ron Evans B. Harrison Schmitt C. Eugene Cernan D. Ed Mitchell |
| Find out the answer in next week’s NASA newsletter! |
 | Last week, we asked how mission planners worked within the limited space of the Gemini spacecraft for the two-week Gemini VII mission in December 1965. The answer? The Gemini VII astronauts stowed their garbage behind their seats! For the first seven days, the crew was instructed to put food wrappers, papers, and other unneeded items behind Commander Frank Borman’s seat, and for the remaining seven days they were discarded behind Pilot James Lovell’s seat. |
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| Do you have a telescope? Would you like to see some of the same night sky objects from the ground that Hubble has seen from space? We invite you to commemorate the Hubble Space Telescope’s 35th anniversary by accepting our yearlong stargazing challenge! New challenge objects will be featured weekly. This week’s object is Messier 45, commonly called the Pleiades or Seven Sisters, an open star cluster roughly 445 light-years from Earth in the constellation Taurus. It contains over a thousand stars loosely bound by gravity, but a handful of its brightest members visually dominate the cluster. Observed since ancient times, the Pleiades have no known discoverer. However, Galileo Galilei, the Italian scientist best known for discovering the largest moons of Jupiter and championing a heliocentric model of the solar system, was the first to observe the Pleiades through a telescope. JOIN THE CELEBRATION |
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