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China’s Chang’e 7 moon probe will launch this weekend on the most ambitious lunar mission in history

Update for Aug. 23: Bad weather has pushed the Chang'e 7 launch back considerably, possibly until 2027. Read our delay story.

China's moon exploration program is readying an ambitious robotic mission, one composed of an orbiter, a lander, a rover, a hopper, and a wide range of international experiments including a U.S.-supported payload.

In April of this year, Chang'e-7 hardware was transported to the Wenchang launch site, targeting an Aug. 24 launch atop a Long March 5 Y14 rocket. The lander's destination is the edge of Shackleton Crater in the lunar south pole region.

After launch, the Chang'e-7 orbiter will spend several months orbiting the moon before releasing its lander for an attempted touchdown near the end of the year. While Chang'e-7 will carry out ambitious, groundbreaking lunar science, it will also serve to lay the groundwork for the first Chinese human landing on the lunar surface by 2030.

James Head is a leading moon scientist at the department of geological sciences at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. He says China's upcoming moon launch will set a new benchmark for lunar science voyages.

"Chang'e-7 is the most ambitious, comprehensive, and complex robotic lunar mission ever attempted by any nation or entity," Head told Space.

Likewise, Zhang Jingbo, a spokesman for the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) agency, said earlier this year that the mission will "fully leverage the technological expertise and practical experience accumulated over decades" to "spare no effort to strive for the goal of achieving the first Chinese landing on the moon by 2030."

Pockets of water ice

Once unleashed from the Chang'e-7 lander, the hopper is slated to "jump" from sunlit areas to shadowed craters in a quest to find pockets of water ice. The hopper utilizes active shock-absorption technology to safely land on slopes. The lander will also deploy China's inaugural deep-space "landmark image navigation" system.

While scientists around the globe believe there's water ice on the moon, said Ye Peijian, an academician with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, no one has definitively found and fully evaluated that resource as yet.

"Now China is going to look for it, [...] And we're using many methods, from searching the surface to exploring inside craters," Ye told China Central Television (CCTV).

a crescent-shaped rim of a crater

The rim of Shackleton crater; the lunar south pole is located on the rim near the upper right corner of the image. (Image credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University)

Back-to-back duties

The Chang'e-7 mission will adopt an integrated exploration approach, added CCTV, combining orbiting, landing, roving, and hopping, to survey the environment and resources of the lunar south pole, while also carrying out international cooperation.

Moreover, a Chang'e-8 mission is set for around 2028, designed to test technologies for building habitats using lunar soil.

Taken together, the two robotic projects  — Chang'e-7 and Chang'e-8  — are assigned duties to assist in orchestrating China's planned, multi-phased, International Lunar Research Station (ILRS).

a white rocket upright on a launch tower surrounded by green, tropical trees

The combination of the Chang'e-7 lunar probe and the Long March-5 Y14 carrier rocket at the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site on Aug. 19, 2026 in Wenchang, Hainan Province of China. (Image credit: VCG/VCG via Getty Images)

Variety of instruments

Chang'e-7 mission hardware is outfitted with a variety of instruments from other nations and organizations, such as:

  • On the lander, a Russian Academy of Sciences' PmL-Ch7 suite to detect lunar dust and a Langmuir probe to gauge the temperature and density of nearby plasma.
  • An Italian laser retroreflector array on the lander is provided by the Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati.
  • A small, state-of-the-art, wide-field optical telescope mounted on the lander developed by the International Lunar Observatory Association (ILOA Hawaii) and the Laboratory for Space Research at the University of Hong Kong (HKU-LSR).
  • LunaHcam, a camera attached to the Chang'e-7 orbiter and jointly developed by the Bahrain Space Agency and the Egyptian Space Agency to churn out high-resolution hyperspectral images of the moon's surface.
  • Moon Aiming Thai-Chinese Hodoscope (MATCH) onboard the orbiter and developed by the National Astronomical Research Institute of Thailand. It will assess high-energy particles related to space weather and cosmic radiation tossed out by the sun.
  • Moon-based Dual-channel Earth Radiation Spectrometer on the orbiter has been provided by Switzerland's Physical Meteorological Observatory.

Compact lunar camera

The ILO-C instrument from ILOA Hawaii and the Laboratory for Space Research at the University of Hong Kong will be housed directly on the Chang'e-7 lunar lander, bound for the illuminated rim of Shackleton Crater.

"The HKU Lab for Space Research is proud to partner with ILOA for this historic lunar mission and we look forward to working with them to maximize the scientific return this exceptional wide field optical lunar camera will deliver," said Quentin Parker, professor emeritus of the University of Hong Kong.

Through visible color imaging, the ILO-C camera project aims to spark public interest in lunar exploration, astronomy, and space science, Parker said, thereby laying a social foundation for future lunar science missions.

Moon-based vantage point

Operating in the extreme lunar environment, the compact camera will conduct first-ever astronomical color imagery from the moon, said Elisa Perednia, President and Chair of ILOA. The camera is designed to capture unprecedented wide-field, full color imagery of the Milky Way's Galactic plane from a stable, moon-based vantage point, she said.

One sad note: The camera onboard China's moon lander was pioneered by ILOA's founding director Steve Durst who passed earlier this year. He was a visionary leader that worked with Chinese aerospace representatives since the 1980s.

The Beijing Institute of Space Mechanics & Electricity (BISME) built the camera to ILO-C team member specifications.

"We are proud to have joined the mission and to help realize Steve's wonderful vision," Parker at HKU-LSR told Space.com.

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Microbes from Earth may survive on the moon, scientists find

Microbes from Earth might survive the harsh surface of the moon, albeit in a state of suspended animation, a new study finds.

Previous research suggested the surface of the moon was too harsh for microbes to survive. Specifically, a 2019 study found ultraviolet rays and heat from the sun are the greatest barriers for microbial life on the lunar surface.

However, this prior work did not account for the shelter that hills and valleys might supply on the moon. These could prove especially significant at the lunar poles, where the sun never climbs high in the sky, leading to permanently shadowed regions that can host ice — and perhaps more.

In the new study, researchers analyzed three kinds of bacteria and two kinds of fungus. These are all commonly found on crewed space missions, and include microorganisms that prior work discovered were especially durable in the harsh conditions of space. Previous research found these lifeforms are resistant to vacuum, cold and high-energy particles.

The scientists compared previously compiled survivability data of these microbes with lunar maps that captured ultraviolet and heat readings on the moon's surface. They found that both lunar poles likely have areas where microbes could survive, albeit in a state of suspended animation known as cryptobiosis in which they could not move or grow unless more hospitable conditions appeared.

Microbes might not need much in the way of shelter on the moon. "Even a bootprint or a rover's tread may create a habitable area," study co-author Prabal Saxena, a planetary scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, told Space.com.

NASA's Artemis III mission is planned to be the first time humans will explore the lunar south pole. "Our findings show that we need to be even more thoughtful about the materials that we might unintentionally take with us when we are exploring space, and the impacts that we might have," study co-author Heather Graham, an organic geochemist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, told Space.com.

In addition to the possibility that missions to the moon might bring microorganisms there, the scientists added it might be possible that ancient cosmic impacts might have blasted rocks bearing microbes off Earth that could have landed on the moon. "The moon might be like Earth's freezer, preserving really interesting bits of evidence of Earth's past if they landed at the moon's poles," Saxena said.

Future experiments may test just how well microbes of many kinds might survive on the moon, Saxena said. "We have this great opportunity to really think about the limits of life and how resilient it is even in incredibly extreme environments," he said.

All in all, "the moon is a really diverse and interesting body, and the lunar poles are really unique regions in terms of how they can trap volatiles like water, and the ability to trap life," Saxena said.

The scientists detailed their findings online Aug. 19 in the journal Science Advances.

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Mars Express orbiter captures detailed new video of the crater where Mark Watney was stranded in ‘The Martian’

Europe's Mars Express orbiter has captured new, stunning imagery flying low over a geological region of the Red Planet shaped by ancient waterflow billions of years ago.

Mars Express launched in 2003 and is operated by the European Space Agency (ESA). It's equipped with the High Resolution Stereo Camera, which scans multiple points of perspective across regions of Mars' surface to create 3D color renderings. During a low pass on the spacecraft's highly elliptical orbit, Mars Express flew over the planet's Southern Highlands and Schiaparelli Crater — one of Mars' largest impact sites.

Schiaparelli Crater is located in a heavily cratered region of Mars' Southern Highlands, where a wetter and warmer climate supported water flows that shaped the planet's geography 3.7 billion years ago, according to ESA's Mars Express video. Schiaparelli measures more than 285 miles (460 km) across, and has a bit of fictional fame. The crater happens to be the site where astronaut character Mark Watney gets stranded in Andy Weir's "The Martian". It also shares a namesake with ESA's real-life Schiaparelli Mars lander, which crashed on Mars' surface in 2016 (but wasn't headed for Schiaparelli Crater).

The wide strip of land in Utopia Planitia imaged by Mars Express. The dark volcanic material is on the right, while grabens can be seen on the left. (Image credit: European Space Agency)

Both are named for Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli (1835–1910), who made detailed observations of Mars during the planet's closest approach in 1877. Schiaparelli created a map of "canali," Italian for "channels," he saw as dark lines across its surface, which he assumed were filled with water. That was later mistranslated by English-speaking astronomers as "canals," leading to speculation about intelligent life on Mars constructing artificial structures.

Though that hypothesis for Mars' surface features was disproven by later astronomers (to date, there have been no discoveries on Mars that suggest intelligent life once lived there), it has since been discovered that Mars once did have active bodies of water on its surface. Schiarapelli's contributions to the astronomical field were significant enough to land him the honor of a Martian crater in his name.

Despite its massive diameter, Schiaparelli is considered shallow compared to other Martian craters its size. It was once much deeper, but sediment deposited by wind and ancient water flows, volcanic eruptions and asteroid impact debris have filled the crater over the last several billion years.

In addition to showcasing Mars Express' new footage, the ESA video also provides an explanation for how the satellite uses its High Resolution Stereo Camera to observe five simultaneous viewing angles over a four-color spectrum as it flies low over the planet. The low-orbit passes allow Mars Express to capture swaths of 3D data that span hundreds to thousands of miles long and dozens of miles across. Those are then stitched together to form more complete regional maps, which can be added to scientists' increasingly complex model of the entire Martian globe.

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Try not to be hypnotized by the ‘Eye of Africa’ | Space photo of the day for Aug. 20, 2026

The Richat Structure as seen from space.

The Richat Structure (also known as the "Eye of Africa" in Mauritania in Africa as photographed by NASA astronaut Jessica Meir from aboard the International Space Station. (Image credit: Jessica Meir/NASA)

The "Eye of Africa" swirls across Mauritania in a hypnotizing snapshot captured from space.

What is it?

A 25-mile-wide (40 kilometer-wide) circular structure made up of concentric ridged rings sticks up from the Earth in Mauritania, a country on the coast of northwestern Africa. While it might look like an elaborate, hand-carved piece of artwork, it's actually a natural geologic feature.

Formally known as the Richat Structure and nicknamed the "Eye of Africa," this geologic formation can be seen clearly from space.

The first time this feature was seen from space was in 1965 when NASA astronauts Ed White and James McDivitt photographed it during the Gemini IV mission.

61 years later, NASA astronaut Jessica Meir has photographed the feature from aboard the International Space Station where she is working as part of Expedition 75.

Why is it incredible?

Meir shared the photo of the structure on social media along with other photographs from that region.

"The Richat Structure (or Eye of Africa) in Mauritania is photographed from above by many astronauts, but something about the lighting and coloring on this day captured my artistic eye. This palette and textures of this region of Africa scream pure Earth Art, at least in my brain!" Meir said in the post where she shared her photos.

Amazingly, because of its massive size, this geologic feature is perhaps most clearly seen from space. While astronauts aboard the ISS are orbiting our planet from hundreds of miles away, theit vantage point actually allows them to see the full, expansive circles that make up the "Eye of Africa." And while we've been seeing it from space since 1965, the view really never gets old.

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James Webb Space Telescope finds ‘hidden stars’ making the universe’s 1st galaxies much bigger than we knew

Imagine looking at a vast city on Earth from a great distance, knowing nothing about that city; you may assume that its only buildings are the largest, most visible skyscrapers. But, get closer or look with a far more powerful tool, and you would begin to discover smaller buildings between mountainous skyscrapers.

Now, the James Webb Space Telescope has discovered that this looks like that is a fitting analogy for early galaxies.

Astronomers are finding that in between the brightest stars, the 'tallest skyscrapers' in the above analogy, there are much fainter stars analogous to smaller buildings. That means early galaxies may actually have a lot more mass packed into them than we believed.

The team behind this research reached this conclusion by using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to study nine early galaxies that have passed through their period of intense star formation. They combined this data with observations from the Very Large Telescope (VLT) here on Earth to measure the population of small and faint stars in these galaxies for the first time. What they found was that the proportion of small stars in these galaxies is much greater than is found in modern galaxies like the Milky Way. This comes as something of a surprise to scientists who have assumed these populations would be similar.

"This means that the galaxy as a whole is much more massive than previous estimates suggested," team member Chloe Cheng of Leiden University, Netherlands, said in a statement.

The first 'cosmic cities' weren't dominated by skyscrapers, it just looks that way

Astronomers study galaxies and calculate their stellar population rates using the total light, or spectrum, coming from these cosmic metropolises. The problem is, the more massive a star is, the brighter it is. Thus, the overall spectrum of a galaxy is dominated by the most massive stars, while smaller stars are drowned out.

The sensitivity of the JWST has allowed astronomers to finally give these smaller stars a chance to shine and stand out, like spotting an incredible piece of architecture in a vast metropolis of glass and steel.

"Until recently, this type of measurement was simply not possible," team member Martje Slob of Leiden University said. "We needed not only a telescope that collects sufficient light, but also spectra of exceptional quality and new analysis techniques to reliably distinguish the subtle features of small stars."

a nine-panel illustration of bright glowing lights on a black background

Nine galaxies studied by the James Webb Space Telescope. Their spectrum reveals that there are many more relatively small stars in these galaxies (Image credit: Cheng et al/ Nature Astronomy 2026)

The team's discovery has implications for our understanding of young galaxies in the early universe. This is because scientists had always assumed the stars of different masses were born in the same proportion across cosmic history. Now that seemingly isn't the case.

That is especially true if more early galaxies are like one particularly striking example examined in this study. This galaxy, which formed less than 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang, contains up to four times the mass previously estimated thanks to its huge population of smaller stars.

Thus, our models of galaxy formation may need some serious revision in the near future.

"This result shows that much more mass than previously thought is hidden in small stars," team leader Mariska Kriek of Leiden University said. "That has implications for all kinds of fields within astronomy. Because many planets orbit small stars, it could even mean that more planets formed in the early universe than we previously assumed."

a telescope with a mirror made of gold hexagons floating on a starry background

An illustration of the JWST which continues to break new ground in astronomy. (Image credit: Robert Lea (created with Canva))

The team now intends to apply this method to more of the universe's earliest galaxies, hoping to stretch their investigation back to the universe's first stars.

The team's research was published on Wednesday (August 18) in the journal Nature Astronomy.

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Scientists just found the fastest known star in the Milky Way. It zooms around our black hole at 15,500 miles per second

Astronomers have found the fastest known star in the Milky Way, a faint object racing around Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the heart of our galaxy. Dubbed S301, the star reaches about 15,500 miles (25,000 kilometers) per second at its fastest — more than 8% the speed of light.

"What is special about this star is that it's orbiting Sagittarius A* on a very tight orbit, taking just 8.7 years to complete it, and is approaching the black hole at a mere 12 times the distance of Earth to the sun. That is unprecedented," study author Felix Mang, a Ph.D. student at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany, said in a statement.

The discovery gives astronomers a new way to probe the roughly 4.3-million-solar-mass black hole. General relativity predicts that a rotating black hole drags spacetime along with it, an effect known as frame dragging, or Lense-Thirring precession. That distortion should gradually alter S301's orbit — because the star ventures so close to Sagittarius A*, those changes may become measurable within about a decade.

A view of the Milky Way's center.

This visible light wide-field view shows the rich star clouds in the constellation of Sagittarius (the Archer) in the direction of the center of our Milky Way galaxy. The entire image is filled with vast numbers of stars — but far more remain hidden behind clouds of dust and are only revealed in infrared images. This view was created from photographs in red and blue light and form part of the Digitized Sky Survey 2. (Image credit: ESO and Digitized Sky Survey 2. Acknowledgment: Davide De Martin and S. Guisard)

For the first time, we would actually be able to measure very directly the spin of a massive black hole, which would be a key test of Einstein's theory," said study co-author Stefan Gillessen, also of the Max Planck Institute.

A diagram showing different views of the star.

This sequence of images, taken with the GRAVITY instrument at ESO’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI), show several stars orbiting Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy. One of these stars, known as S301, was recently found to pass much closer to the black hole than any other known star. (Image credit: ESO/GRAVITY collaboration)

Researchers spotted S301 in 2023 using the GRAVITY instrument on the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope Interferometer in Chile, then traced it back through observations from 2021 and 2017. Its highly elongated orbit suggests S301 may once have belonged to a binary system that wandered too close to Sagittarius A*. The black hole could have captured S301 while flinging its companion outward at tremendous speed.

Astronomers plan to keep tracking S301 with GRAVITY+ and, eventually, ESO's Extremely Large Telescope. With its next close pass expected in 2031, observations spanning two full orbits could reveal Sagittarius A*'s spin for the first time.

The team's research was published on August 19 in the journal Nature.

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Dark matter could magnify the jets of a ravenously feeding supermassive black hole

Astronomers have discovered that a jet of plasma erupting from a distant supermassive black hole at near-light-speed is being gravitationally lensed by an unseen clump of dark matter. The discovery could tell us about the source of cosmic "ghost" particles called neutrinos.

The supermassive black hole in question is powering a type of quasar called a blazar. All quasars involve supermassive black holes surrounded by vast quantities of material upon which the black holes feed. Material that isn't consumed by these feasting cosmic titans is channeled to the poles of the black holes, from where it is blasted out as plasma jets. A blazar differs from quasars in general because the jets it blasts out are directed at Earth. Blazars, like the one central to this study, designated PKS 2233-148, have long been proposed to be the cosmic particle accelerators that blast out neutrinos.

Neutrinos get their ghostly nickname because they carry no charge and very little mass, meaning that 100 trillion of them can pass through your body every second without you noticing a thing. This makes them hard to both detect and trace back to a source. This gravitationally lensed blazar could assist in that hunt, finally proving blazars are filling the universe with cosmic ghosts.

"These large-scale jets are cosmic accelerators and might be generating neutrinos," Silke Britzen at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany told Phys.org. "We study them to search for any peculiarities which might help us to gain a better understanding of neutrino emission."

Blazar jet receives a cosmic course correction

Astronomers have long been interested in PKS 2233-148, identifying this blazar as one that could solidify the link between neutrinos and the jets of feeding supermassive black holes. That is because one of its polar jets is aligned along our line of sight from Earth.

Britzen and colleagues took a new look at observations of PKS 2233-148 made by the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) on Earth, the Fermi space telescope, which viewed the blazar in gamma rays, and the X-ray instrument aboard the Swift space observatory.

A visualization of the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory.

An illustration of the Swift spacecraft which observed PKS 2233-148 in X-rays. (Image credit: NASA)

This revealed how the motion of the jet of PKS 2233-148 changed over time, uncovering hitherto hidden details, including the fact that this blazar jet had been suddenly shifted from its expected path.

"We are very happy to have discovered as-yet-undetected phenomena in the jet, as well as in the gamma-ray light curve," Britzen said.

What could have caused this cosmic course correction? A phenomenon first predicted by Albert Einstein back in 1915 and an unseen cluster of the universe's strangest stuff, dark matter.

What is gravitational lensing and how can dark matter cause it?

The concept of gravitational lensing emerged from Einstein's theory of gravity, general relativity. General relativity states that objects with matter warp the very fabric of space, much like a bowling ball placed on a stretched rubber sheet. Gravity arises from that curvature.

And just as a cannonball would dent that hypothetical rubber sheet more than a bowling ball, an object with greater mass would cause a more extreme warp in space; its gravitational influence is greater.

Something cool happens when light passes this warped space; its usually straight path is curved. This means that when light from a background source passes a massive foreground object acting as a gravitational lens, it arrives at our telescopes at different times, meaning that the background source is magnified or, in extreme cases, can appear in multiple places in the same image.

In this case, it is the jet of PKS 2233-148 that is being lensed. But there is no object of great mass, like a galaxy or galaxy cluster, that can be seen in the right position to be doing the lensing. That leaves the possibility that the lensing body is something that can't be seen at all. Dark matter fits the bill.

A diagram (not to scale) of how gravitational lensing works.

An illustration shows the basic principles behind gravitational lensing (Image credit: NASA, ESA & L. Calçada)

Dark matter is effectively invisible because it doesn't directly interact with electromagnetic radiation, or light. In other words, dark matter doesn't emit light, and light doesn't bounce off it. That means even a clump large enough to play the role of a gravitational lens would be undetectable. But that doesn't mean light can't respond to the curvature of space caused by dark matter, just as it does to curvature caused by any body composed of "ordinary" matter like a star or a galaxy.

Like any gravitational lensing set-up, the lensing of the jet of PKS 2233-148 caused by this clump of dark matter requires precise alignment, and that means it is only a temporary thing.

"Because these are short-term phenomena, they are hard to find," Britzen said. "This is the first time that we find a lensing phenomenon which might hint at dark matter substructure."

Britzen and colleagues now hope to find other similar lensing events to further solidify the connection between blazars and neutrino factories.

The team's research was published on July 31 in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

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A SpaceX rocket slammed into the moon this month — and a NASA spacecraft has spotted its lunar grave (photos)

NASA's veteran moon-circling spacecraft, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), has imaged the impact site of that errant Falcon 9 upper stage.

The photos were taken on Aug. 11 and Aug. 12, just a few days after the SpaceX rocket body slammed into the moon near Einstein Crater at 5,400 mph (8,690 kph).

LRO's high-resolution camera system, known as LROC, got good views of the aftermath from a variety of angles, snapping away every 117 minutes, the time it takes the orbiter to circuit the moon.

before-and-after animated view of the crater-pocked lunar surface as seen from lunar orbit, showing the emergence of a new crater

This is an animated before-and-after view of the crater formed after a Falcon 9 upper stage struck the moon's surface on Aug. 5, 2026. The after images were taken on Aug. 11 and Aug. 12 by the Narrow-Angle Camera on NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. These images are enlarged three times from the original, with north facing up, and they cover an area about a quarter of a mile wide. (Image credit: NASA Goddard/Intuitive Machines)

Diameter and depth

According to LROC Principal Investigator Mark Robinson, who's based at the Houston company Intuitive Machines, the newly formed impact crater is about 60 feet (18 meters) wide and appears to be less than 10 feet (3 m) deep.

"The distinctive V-shaped ejecta pattern on the south side of the crater is consistent with natural impactors hitting the moon at low angles relative to the surface," said Robinson.

The sixth (and final) image in LROC's sequence of the new crater, he added, was acquired with the largest slew angle (68 degrees), presenting a view similar to what an Artemis astronaut would see looking out his or her Orion spacecraft window toward the lunar horizon.

Telling tilts

To capture imagery of the impact site, LRO operators tilted the spacecraft so its cameras would point toward the target region each time the spacecraft passed about 60 miles (97 km) above the moon. In doing so, researchers could see the crater under multiple lighting conditions that revealed impact features.

According to NASA, the LRO imagery shows bright and dark rays stretching out from the crater.

"The darker streaks are made of surface dust and rocks altered over a long time by solar wind, galactic cosmic rays, and micrometeorite impacts. This weathered material was excavated by the collision," with the brighter streaks near the crater rim formed by "fresh material excavated from deeper underground," NASA officials said in an Aug. 18 statement.

a photograph of a grey mottled surface on which a dark oval area is circled in white

Image of the Falcon 9 impact site, taken by South Korea's Danuri lunar orbiter. (Image credit: KARI)

Korea's lunar orbiter

The site of the Aug. 5 crash was imaged earlier by the Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter, also known as Danuri. That mission team used Danuri's high-resolution Lunar Terrain Imager to spot the new crater. After capturing images of the impact zone, the Danuri mission sent updated crater coordinates to the LRO team to help refine their follow-up imaging sequence, NASA officials said.

Wandering through space for over a year and a half, the leftover Falcon 9 upper stage had sent two robotic landers — Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost and Resilience, built by the Japanese company ispace — toward the moon back on Jan. 15, 2025. Blue Ghost succeeded in its lunar touchdown, but Resilience crashed during its attempt.

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Perseverance rover watches alien solar eclipse on Mars | Space photo of the day for Aug. 19, 2026

A yellowish sun against a black background is partially obscured by a Martian moon.

NASA's Perseverance Mars rover saw a solar eclipse from the Martian surface. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU)

People around the world enjoyed stellar views with last week's total solar eclipse.

And the day after we looked up to see the moon obscuring out sun, NASA's Perseverance Mars rover looked up to see its own Martian solar eclipse.

What is it?

Solar eclipses aren't unique to Earth. In theory, any planet with at least one orbiting moon would have times where that moon might eclipse some part of its sun to anyone looking up from the planet's surface.

On Aug. 13, 2026, one day after Earth's total solar eclipse in which our moon temporarily blocked out our sun for skywatchers in some locations, Mars saw its own solar eclipse.

Looking up with its left Mastcam-Z camera, Perseverance snapped this image of one of Mars' two moons, Phobos and Deimos, partially eclipsing the sun. This appears to be Phobos — the larger of the pair — eclipsing the sun.

Why is it incredible?

So far, we humans have only directly had vantage points on Earth, in Earth orbit and on the moon. We have not yet landed humans on Mars, and it remains unclear how long it might be before that happens.

But robotic explorers like Perseverance allow us to travel where we can't go ourselves. Such travelers have taken us into interstellar space and all throughout our solar system. From Saturn's rings to Neptune's distant, icy neighborhood, robotic probes have allowed humanity's reach to stretch far through the cosmos.

And thanks to Perseverance and its two "eyes," the two Mastcam-Z cameras located high on its mast, we can travel right to the surface of Mars, look up and see an alien solar eclipse. What an amazing thing that is.

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Astronomers discover a giant, rocky ‘mega-Earth’ 23 times more massive than our planet

Astronomers have discovered an unusually massive, dense exoplanet that challenges conventional ideas about how rocky planets form.

Called GJ 523b, the exoplanet is about 2.5 times wider than Earth but packs roughly 23 times our planet's mass into that relatively compact size. Worlds this large and dense are sometimes referred to as "mega-Earths," an informal term for unusually massive, predominantly rocky planets. GJ 523b's high density suggests it contains relatively little atmosphere despite being large enough that astronomers would normally expect it to have accumulated a substantial gaseous envelope, according to a statement from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

"This isn't what we expected at all," Max Kroft, lead author of the study, said in the statement. "Dense planets like this aren't uncommon, but they're usually small rocky planets similar to Earth or Mercury. This planet is two and a half times bigger than the Earth."

GJ 523b was initially identified as a candidate by NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which searches for periodic dips in starlight caused when planets cross, or transit, their host stars. Researchers followed up with observations from the ground-based WIYN 3.5-meter Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, using a spectrograph to measure the planet's gravitational tug on its star.

Combining those observations, the team calculated that GJ 523b has a mass about 23.5 times that of Earth, a radius 2.55 times larger and a density of about 126.82 grams per cubic inch. It circles its star every 17.75 days. The planetary system is also relatively young, at an estimated nearly 170 million years old, according to the study.

That combination of size, mass and youth poses a puzzle for planet formation models. Planets begin by building cores of rock and metal, which can then pull in hydrogen and helium from the disk of gas and dust surrounding a young star. In our own solar system, giant planets such as Jupiter and Saturn are thought to have begun rapidly accumulating their massive gaseous envelopes once their growing cores reached roughly 20 times Earth's mass.

GJ 523b is already about 23 times Earth's mass, putting it beyond that threshold. Yet instead of developing into a gas-rich world, its unusually high density suggests it has relatively little gas and remains predominantly rocky — raising the question of why it followed such a different path.

"The question is, why didn't this planet do that, if it's 20 times the size of Earth?" Kroft said in the statement.

One possibility is that GJ 523b initially formed with a thick atmosphere that was later stripped away. Another is that it formed through a collision between two planets, creating a larger rocky world while blasting much of their gaseous envelopes into space, according to the statement.

Astronomers have used the term "mega-Earth" for more than a decade to describe exceptionally massive rocky worlds, though it has never represented a formally established class of exoplanets. Finding more examples like GJ 523b could help reveal whether these unusual worlds are rare exceptions or part of a broader population.

"It's hard to infer things about planet formation in general from a sample size of one," Kroft said in the statement. "We're not going to get to 10,000 of these overdense planets, but if we can get to 20 or 30, maybe some trends might pop out."

The findings have been submitted to The Astronomical Journal and are currently available on the preprint server arXiv and have not yet been peer reviewed.