ISS Leak Prompts NASA Action

🛰️ ISS leak concerns grow

🌌 Fastest ultraviolet black hole wind found

🚀 SpaceX and Google AI deal

🌙 Artemis II research continues earthside

⭐ Metal mystery in binary star system

NASA and Roscosmos engineers continue addressing persistent cracks in the ISS (International Space Station) Zvezda service module's PrK transfer tunnel, which have caused atmosphere leaks since 2019.

Roscosmos detected leak rates increasing to two pounds of atmosphere per day during Progress 95 cargo operations the week of June 1, prompting plans for structural bracket cutting to access suspected leak sources.

NASA directed SpaceX Crew-12 and astronaut Chris Williams into safe haven aboard Dragon spacecraft during repair procedures, though Roscosmos paused work for additional assessments, according to the agency's space station blog.

York University researchers led by Professor Patrick Hall discovered the fastest ultraviolet-wavelength wind ever detected near a supermassive black hole, studying quasar J2318 located in the constellation Pegasus using SDSS (Sloan Digital Sky Survey) data.

The team's Gemini North telescope observations confirmed gas velocities reaching 30 percent of the speed of light, driven by a quasar surrounding a black hole with 1.7 billion solar masses, published in The Astrophysical Journal.

These extreme outflows carry energy capable of affecting surrounding galaxies, serving as observational evidence for feedback mechanisms included in galaxy formation simulations for decades, according to co-author Professor Paola Rodríguez Hidalgo.

SpaceX signed a major cloud computing agreement with Google ahead of its June 12 IPO, leveraging data center infrastructure originally built for Elon Musk's xAI venture at Colossus facilities in Memphis, Tennessee.

Google will pay $920 million monthly starting October 2026 for access to approximately 110,000 Nvidia GPUs powering Gemini AI models, with the contract running through June 2029 totaling roughly $30 billion.

The deal supports SpaceX's $1.8 trillion IPO valuation, which analysts say depends on expanding Starlink satellite services and deploying orbital data centers, according to the company's SEC filing.

NASA science teams are analyzing data from Artemis II crew members Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen following their April 10 Pacific Ocean splashdown after circumlunar flight.

Researchers collected Spaceflight Standard Measures data within 24 hours of landing, then conducted obstacle courses in lunar-gravity spacesuits at Johnson Space Center to assess motor control adaptation over subsequent days.

AVATAR organ chips containing astronaut bone marrow cells are undergoing single-cell RNA sequencing at Emulate's Boston laboratory, potentially enabling personalized medical kits for future deep space missions, according to NASA researchers.

Researchers submitted findings to arXiv examining unusual chemical abundance patterns observed in a binary star system, investigating how two stars formed from the same molecular cloud exhibit unexpectedly different elemental compositions.

The study analyzed spectroscopic data revealing significant metallicity variations between companions, with measurements showing divergent iron-peak element ratios despite the stars sharing common origin and orbital dynamics within the system.

This chemical paradox challenges standard stellar formation models assuming compositional homogeneity in binary systems, potentially requiring revised theories of protoplanetary disk evolution, according to the preprint submitted to arXiv.