Artemis III Launching No Earlier Than Late 2027

🚀 Artemis III delayed to late 2027

🛰️ Moon rocket hardware moves forward

🌟 Why dying stars speed up or slow

🔭 JWST hunts for Earth-like exomoons

⭐ New limits on distant lunar analogs

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman confirmed to Congress that SpaceX and Blue Origin have committed to having their lunar landers ready for late 2027 Earth orbit rendezvous testing, delaying the original schedule.

The revised Artemis III mission will test Orion docking with Starship and Blue Moon landers in low-Earth orbit, avoiding the need for the SLS (Space Launch System) upper stage already in storage.

To Isaacman, successful Earth orbit testing enables up to two lunar landing attempts in 2028, maintaining NASA's goal of beating China's crewed Moon mission timeline.

NASA Kennedy Space Center technicians maneuvered the Artemis III SLS core stage into the Vehicle Assembly Building while simultaneously receiving the Artemis II Orion capsule for post-flight analysis.

The 212-foot core stage houses tanks holding 733,000 gallons of super-chilled propellant feeding four RS-25 engines, while twin solid rocket boosters will generate 8.8 million pounds of thrust.

NASA officials state this marks the first core stage assembly at Kennedy, streamlining production as the agency targets annual Artemis mission launches through 2028.

Kyoto University researchers led by Ryota Shimada used 3D magnetohydrodynamic simulations to investigate how magnetic fields affect rotation inside massive stars approaching core-collapse supernova stages.

Their simulations revealed that convection-magnetic field interactions transport angular momentum radially, with certain magnetic geometries unexpectedly spinning stellar cores up rather than down over time.

Per Lucy McNeill, slow rotation may be forbidden in some massive star classes, suggesting solar-type spin-down theory applies universally across stellar mass ranges.

Astronomers submitted new research to arXiv describing methods for detecting Earth-like exomoons using JWST (James Webb Space Telescope) observations of transiting exoplanets in distant stellar systems.

The study proposes using JWST's NIRSpec transit spectroscopy to identify atmospheric signatures and orbital perturbations indicating moon presence around gas giant exoplanets in habitable zones.

Researchers believe detecting habitable exomoons would dramatically expand the catalog of potentially life-bearing worlds beyond traditional Earth-analog planet searches around Sun-like stars.

University of Lancashire astrophysicists led by Dr. Matthew Teasdale modeled gas disc evolution around young binary stars to understand circumbinary planet formation in gravitationally complex environments.

Simulations published in MNRAS (Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society) show discs fragment beyond the gravitational forbidden zone, producing more gas giants than single-star systems through gravitational instability.

According to supervisor Dr. Dimitris Stamatellos, these findings suggest real-life Tatooine-like worlds are common, with over 50 circumbinary exoplanets already discovered confirming the model.