KIlo IU

Nasa's Osiris-Rex capsule will come screaming into Earth's atmosphere on Sunday at more than 15 times the speed of a rifle bullet.

It will make a fireball in the sky as it does so, but a heat shield and parachutes will slow the descent and bring it into a gentle touchdown in Utah's West Desert.

The capsule carries a precious cargo - a handful of dust grabbed from asteroid Bennu, a mountain-sized space rock that promises to inform the most profound of questions: Where do we come from?

Born and raised in the United Arab Emirates, Mr Al Neyadi studied at the University of Brighton.

He graduated in 2004 in electronics and communications engineering before returning to the UAE to pursue a master's degree.

In a post to X, formerly known as Twitter, the former Brighton-based student said he spent "memorable years" in the "beautiful" city.

"Hello from space to all my friends there," he added.

Skip twitter post by Sultan AlNeyadi

It looks for all the world like a giant brolly, but there's no rain where it's going.

This immense reflector-antenna is heading into space, to "weigh" Earth's forests.

It's a key component on the European Space Agency's Biomass mission, now under construction in the UK at aerospace manufacturer Airbus.

When unfurled, the space brolly's 12m by 15m wire-mesh membrane will be part of a very special P-band radar system.

It's special because of its long wavelength.

Its ultraviolet laser tracked the movement of air in all locations, at every altitude, across the world.

The mission's success means replacements are already being planned.

But Ae**us was a project that very nearly didn't happen because of the difficulty in making it work.

Engineers struggled for over a decade to develop an instrument that would operate for long enough in the vacuum of space.

In the Shona language, zimbabwe translates approximately to "stone house", and because of the site's size and scope, it became known as Great Zimbabwe. Moreover, it was not the only such "Zimbabwe": there are remains of approximately 200 smaller settlements or trading posts spread across the region, from the Kalahari Desert in Namibia to Mozambique.

According to Munyaradzi Manyanga, a professor of archaeology and cultural heritage at Great Zimbabwe University, the position of Great Zimbabwe among these settlements has been widely debated. Some people have speculated that it was a capital city of a very large state, but to Manyanga, that seems unlikely. "Such a state would have been too large. One wouldn't have been able to manage that kind of extent and size. So most of the interpretations talk of these as having been influenced by Great Zimbabwe." He added that the Kingdom of Zimbabwe is considered to be made up of Great Zimbabwe and the smaller settlements located closer to it.

The telescope has other objectives, too, one of which is to show us the detail of how stars are created and how they spawn planets. And it's for this reason that Rho Ophiuchi is a fascinating target for the most powerful observatory in space.

"There's so much going on in this spectacular picture, as young stars splash vibrant colours across the clouds of gas and dust from which they're being born," commented Prof Mark McCaughrean, Esa's senior advisor for science & exploration.

UK engineers will design a robot that can retrieve rock samples on Mars so they can be sent to Earth for study.

The European Space Agency is issuing contracts to industry to spec the technology needed for what will be a complex joint undertaking with the US.

Aerospace giant Airbus will scope the concept for a surface "fetch rover" at its Stevenage centre north of London.

This junk includes old rocket segments; bits that have fallen off satellites; flecks of paint - even tools dropped by spacewalking astronauts.

The concern is that this material is becoming so abundant it could pose a collision hazard to operational missions that provide important services, such as telecommunications and environmental monitoring.

RemoveDebris was designed to test relatively simple - and therefore low-cost - methods of clean-up.

Other missions will try alternatives, including robotic arms that reach out and grab junk. But this kind of approach is very complex and therefore much more expensive to implement.

Dr David Kipping, who leads a team at Columbia University, New York, has been interested in the idea of exomoons since he was a student.

"There aren't very many of us looking for these things, but I'm sure as soon as we start finding them there'll be more people who join in the hunt," he told the BBC.

"Trying to understand... how common [they are] will give us some sense of how unique the Solar System is."

"Before the first crew landing occurs, we will be landing an exact copy of that lander prior to that - one year prior. So, we will be testing out full lander systems and the full architecture prior to any astronauts entering the vehicle," explained John Couluris, Blue Origin's vice president for lunar transportation.

The lander could also be configured simply to deliver cargo to the lunar surface - a minimum of 20 tonnes, the executive added.

Blue Origin plans to use its own rocket, known as New Glenn, to get Blue Moon off Earth (although this launcher has yet to make a debut flight). The dimensions of the lander have been determined by the volume and mass parameters of the rocket, which has a 7m-wide payload bay.

These worlds may be in the cold, outer reaches of the Solar System, far from the Sun, but they could just be able to satisfy the four inputs - even for a supply of energy. It's not light and warmth from a star, but the constant gravitational squeezing and pushing the giant planets exert on the moons.

It's this flexure that provides the means to keep water in liquid form and could also drive the kind of volcanic vent systems on ocean floors that Prof Mundell mentions and which some scientists think could have been the origin of life on Earth.

Bennu and Ryugu have many similarities. They are comparable in size, rich in carbon and shaped like spinning tops. Both missions aim to deliver samples from these objects to Earth.

Both asteroids are primitive objects, made of the same basic material that went into building rocky planets like Earth. Studying samples in laboratories could shed light on how our own world came to be.

The identification of Ryugu as a rubble pile asteroid comes from an assessment of its density. Project scientist Sei-ichiro Watanabe said the asteroid's porosity - a measure of the voids, or spaces, present in the object - was 50%.

These measure the constituents of Martian air by looking through the atmosphere towards the Sun. Different molecules absorb the light in characteristic ways.

The precision of this solar occultation method enables TGO to set an upper limit for the methane at just 12 parts per trillion. In other words, if the methane is there, it has to have a lower concentration than this.

"These moons have fairly inclined orbits to Saturn and are pretty far out, so we don't think they formed with the planet, we think they were captured by the planet in the past. If an asteroid happens to be passing by, you can't capture it today because you can't dissipate its energy," Dr Sheppard told BBC News.

However, in the Solar System's youth, when Saturn was in the process of forming, a cloud, or "disc", of dust and gas surrounded the planet. This helped dissipate the energy of passing objects. But in most cases, these bodies ended up spiralling into the planet and becoming part of it.

Nasa's Curiosity rover has been exploring Gale Crater on Mars since 2012. The robot took this "selfie" as it explored the slopes of Mount Sharp - a mountain that forms the central peak of the impact depression.

Two samples of rock drilled from this site showed exceptionally high amounts of clay minerals. Clay often forms in the presence of water, which is a key ingredient for life. Previous evidence had shown that water once pooled in Gale Crater.

Having built the nebula, this left the daunting task of creating a 3D representation of the pillars.

The tallest pillar actually stands behind the two other pillars and each is at a particular angle. The team used data from the Very Large Telescope in Chile to accurately position and orientate the pillars in 3D space. They then "sculpted" a 3D model of the pillars - and mapped-on Hubble's beautiful imagery.

The end result is a visualisation based on real telescope images and data, but with intuition and extrapolation filling in the gaps where the data is lacking.

It will be a couple of years yet before Solar Orbiter makes the first of its very close encounters with the Sun (at a distance of 48 million km).

As the mission progresses, SolO will, with the gravitational assistance of Venus, also lift itself out of the plane of the planets so that it can more easily see the Sun's poles. "Terra incognita", as Sami Solanki, from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research and PI on Solo's Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager, likes to call these regions.

An army of researchers would struggle to fully characterise the contents of all those pixels, but a machine can do it - and fast.

"In a typical workflow, a 2020 land cover map would probably not come out until middle or late this year, because it takes that much processing time, it takes that much checking and validation work to go on," explained Sean Breyer, who manages Esri's Living Atlas of the World programme.

"But we've come up with a process - with our partners Impact Observatory - that uses an AI approach. The entire runtime to compute the entire planet's land cover was under a week. That brings in a whole new dimension to land cover mapping that says we could potentially do land cover mapping on a weekly basis or even a daily basis for targeted areas," he told BBC News.

It took the remarkable capabilities of the new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to make the discovery.

The dust particles are silicates - small grains comprising silicon and oxygen, which form the basis of most rocky minerals.

But the storm detected by Webb isn't quite the same phenomenon you would get in an arid, desert region on our planet. It's more of a rocky mist.

The bright dot is actually Mercury. The black dots are repeats of the little world that occur simply because of the way the picture is constructed.

Parker's WISPR instrument acquired the vista just 27.2 million km from the surface of the Sun on 8 November.

The imager was looking out sideways from behind the probe's thick heat shield.

Одиссей и сирены
1909
Герберт Джеймс Дрейпер
Художественная галерея Ференса, Англия

Пейзаж с красным облаком
1914
Конрад Мяги
Музей Куму, Таллин