🚀 NASA’s 1st Medical Evacuation on ISS

🧑‍🚀 NASA plans crew return

☄️ Record fast-spinning asteroid

🔭 CEO funds Hubble replacement

🌌 Dark matter challenges physics

🛰️ New planet habitability insights

NASA announced on Jan. 8 that the four-person Crew-11 team will depart the International Space Station early due to a non-emergency medical issue involving one crew member that cannot be properly diagnosed or treated in orbit.

The mission consisting of NASA’s Zena Cardman and Michael Fincke, Japan's Kimiya Yui, and Russia's Oleg Platonov launched in August 2025 aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon and was nearing its planned February conclusion.

While the affected astronaut is in stable condition, the early return will briefly leave NASA's Christopher Williams as the sole American on board until the Crew-12 mission launches to restore full staffing levels.

Astronomers led by Sarah Greenstreet at NSF NOIRLab analyzed early data from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, discovering 19 super- and ultra-fast-rotating asteroids, including a new record-holder for its size class.

The main-belt asteroid, 2025 MN45, measures 710 meters in diameter and completes a full rotation every 1.88 minutes, far exceeding the typical 2.2-hour fragmentation limit for rubble pile asteroids.

This rapid spin implies the asteroid possesses a cohesive strength similar to solid rock, challenging the prevailing theory that most large asteroids are loosely-bound rubble piles, according to the research team.

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his wife Wendy announced a major philanthropic investment in four new telescopes, including a privately funded, modern successor to the Hubble Space Telescope named Lazuli.

Lazuli will feature a 3.1-meter primary mirror and operate in a high elliptical orbit with an apogee of 275,000 km, carrying a wide-field camera, spectrograph, and an exoplanet-studying coronagraph.

This project aims to accelerate astronomical hardware development from NASA's typical 25-year cycle to under five years, accepting more risk to advance science faster, according to Schmidt Sciences president Stuart Feldman.

University of Sheffield scientists, including Dr. Eleonora Di Valentino, published new research in Nature Astronomy suggesting a potential interaction between dark matter and neutrinos, challenging a core tenet of cosmology.

The team combined data from the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) with weak lensing surveys, finding evidence that this interaction could explain why matter in the modern universe appears less clumped than predicted.

If confirmed, this interaction would represent a fundamental breakthrough, potentially resolving a long-standing tension in cosmological measurements and guiding future particle physics experiments, according to co-author Dr. William Giarè.

Carnegie astronomer Luke Bouma presented a new method for studying exoplanet habitability by using a strange type of M dwarf star, known as a complex periodic variable, as a natural space weather station.

These young, rapidly rotating stars feature large clumps of cool plasma trapped in their magnetospheres, forming a torus that causes recurring, observable dips in the star's brightness as it rotates.

Bouma estimates at least 10 percent of M dwarfs exhibit these features, providing a novel way to measure how stellar particle winds and magnetic storms directly influence conditions on orbiting rocky planets.