Meet the Artemis III Crew

🚀 NASA names Artemis 3 crew

🌌 Earliest flickering quasar discovered

🔴 Black holes birth Little Red Dots

🛰️ INCUS satellites near launch readiness

☀️ Proba-3 resumes science operations

NASA named Randy Bresnik, Luca Parmitano, Frank Rubio, and Andre Douglas as Artemis III crew members for the 2027 mission testing lunar landing systems in Earth orbit.

The two-week mission sequences Blue Origin's lander pathfinder launch first, followed by SLS (Space Launch System) carrying Orion with crew, then SpaceX's Starship pathfinder for sequential docking tests.

NASA officials describe Artemis III as foundational preparation for Mars missions, with crew member Rubio bringing 371 days of spaceflight experience from his record-breaking International Space Station expedition.

MIT Kavli Institute researchers led by postdoc Gene Leung and assistant professor Anna-Christina Eilers detected the earliest known flickering quasar, dating to cosmic dawn just 850 million years after the Big Bang.

NASA's NEOWISE (Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) captured the quasar flickering by approximately 20 percent over 14 years, revealing brightness fluctuations equivalent to 2 trillion suns.

The findings published in Nature Astronomy deepen cosmological mysteries, as the quasar's flat accretion disk structure suggests supermassive black holes matured far faster than current physics models predict.

Astrophysicists submitted new research examining the connection between mysterious "little red dots" observed by space telescopes and energetic burst activity from early universe black holes.

The study analyzes compact red sources detected at high redshifts, investigating whether their spectral signatures indicate active galactic nuclei or heavily obscured star-forming regions in primordial galaxies.

According to the researchers, understanding little red dots could reveal how supermassive black holes formed and grew during the universe's first billion years, reshaping galaxy evolution models.

Colorado State University principal investigator Sue van den Heever leads NASA's INCUS (Investigation of Convective Updrafts) mission, with three satellites completing testing at Blue Canyon Technologies in Lafayette, Colorado.

The satellites will fly in tight coordination separated by 30 and 90 seconds, each carrying radar instruments to measure convective mass flux while the middle satellite adds a microwave radiometer.

NASA plans a 2027 launch from Wallops Flight Facility, with INCUS joining the FALCON fleet to fulfill Earth System Observatory requirements for studying clouds, convection, and precipitation dynamics.

ESA (European Space Agency) mission manager Damien Galano confirmed Proba-3's Coronagraph spacecraft fully recovered after a February anomaly caused one month of communication loss with ground control teams.

Principal investigator Andrei Zhukov of the Royal Observatory of Belgium verified the ASPIICS coronagraph instrument captured new corona images, with initial data showing solar wind traveling three to four times faster than expected.

ESA engineers successfully patched the root-cause software issue and completed formation flight verification, enabling the eclipse-making mission to resume routine artificial eclipse observations for solar science.