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By NASA
6 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
This artist’s concept shows the Moon’s hot interior and volcanism about 2 to 3 billion years ago. It is thought that volcanic activity on the lunar near side (the side facing Earth) helped create a landscape dominated by vast plains called mare, which are formed by molten rock that cooled and solidified. NASA/JPL-Caltech Analyzing gravity data collected by spacecraft orbiting other worlds reveals groundbreaking insights about planetary structures without having to land on the surface.
Although the Moon and the asteroid Vesta are very different, two NASA studies use the same technique to reveal new details about the interiors of both.
In the lunar study, published May 14 in the journal Nature, researchers developed a new gravity model of the Moon that includes tiny variations in the celestial body’s gravity during its elliptical orbit around Earth. These fluctuations cause the Moon to flex slightly due to Earth’s tidal force — a process called tidal deformation — which provides critical insights into the Moon’s deep internal structure.
Using their model, the researchers produced the most detailed lunar gravitational map yet, providing future missions an improved way to calculate location and time on the Moon. They accomplished this by analyzing data on the motion of NASA’s GRAIL (Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory) mission, whose spacecraft, Ebb and Flow, orbited the Moon from Dec. 31, 2011, to Dec. 17, 2012.
These views of the Moon’s near side, left, and far side were put together from observations made by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. NASA/JPL-Caltech In a second study, published in the journal Nature Astronomy on April 23, the researchers focused on Vesta, an object in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Using NASA’s Deep Space Network radiometric data and imaging data from the agency’s Dawn spacecraft, which orbited the asteroid from July 16, 2011, to Sept. 5, 2012, they found that instead of having distinct layers as expected, Vesta’s internal structure may be mostly uniform, with a very small iron core or no core at all.
“Gravity is a unique and fundamental property of a planetary body that can be used to explore its deep interior,” said Park. “Our technique doesn’t need data from the surface; we just need to track the motion of the spacecraft very precisely to get a global view of what’s inside.”
Lunar Asymmetry
The lunar study looked at gravitational changes to the Moon’s near and far sides. While the near side is dominated by vast plains — known as mare — formed by molten rock that cooled and solidified billions of years ago, the far side is more rugged, with few plains.
NASA’s Dawn mission obtained this image of the giant asteroid Vesta on July 24, 2011. The spacecraft spent 14 months orbiting the asteroid, capturing more than 30,000 images and fully mapping its surface. NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA Both studies were led by Ryan Park, supervisor of the Solar System Dynamics Group at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, and were years in the making due to their complexity. The team used NASA supercomputers to build a detailed map of how gravity varies across each body. From that, they could better understand what the Moon and Vesta are made of and how planetary bodies across the solar system formed.
Some theories suggest intense volcanism on the near side likely caused these differences. That process would have caused radioactive, heat-generating elements to accumulate deep inside the near side’s mantle, and the new study offers the strongest evidence yet that this is likely the case.
“We found that the Moon’s near side is flexing more than the far side, meaning there’s something fundamentally different about the internal structure of the Moon’s near side compared to its far side,” said Park. “When we first analyzed the data, we were so surprised by the result we didn’t believe it. So we ran the calculations many times to verify the findings. In all, this is a decade of work.”
When comparing their results with other models, Park’s team found a small but greater-than-expected difference in how much the two hemispheres deform. The most likely explanation is that the near side has a warm mantle region, indicating the presence of heat-generating radioactive elements, which is evidence for volcanic activity that shaped the Moon’s near side 2 billion to 3 billion years ago.
Vesta’s Evolution
Park’s team applied a similar approach for their study that focused on Vesta’s rotational properties to learn more about its interior.
“Our technique is sensitive to any changes in the gravitational field of a body in space, whether that gravitational field changes over time, like the tidal flexing of the Moon, or through space, like a wobbling asteroid,” said Park. “Vesta wobbles as it spins, so we could measure its moment of inertia, a characteristic that is highly sensitive to the internal structure of the asteroid.”
Changes in inertia can be seen when an ice skater spins with their arms held outward. As they pull their arms in, bringing more mass toward their center of gravity, their inertia decreases and their spin speeds up. By measuring Vesta’s inertia, scientists can gain a detailed understanding of the distribution of mass inside the asteroid: If its inertia is low, there would be a concentration of mass toward its center; if it’s high, the mass would be more evenly distributed.
Some theories suggest that over a long period, Vesta gradually formed onion-like layers and a dense core. But the new inertia measurement from Park’s team suggests instead that Vesta is far more homogeneous, with its mass distributed evenly throughout and only a small core of dense material, or no core.
Gravity slowly pulls the heaviest elements to a planet’s center over time, which is how Earth ended up with a dense core of liquid iron. While Vesta has long been considered a differentiated asteroid, a more homogenous structure would suggest that it may not have fully formed layers or may have formed from the debris of another planetary body after a massive impact.
In 2016, Park used the same data types as the Vesta study to focus on Dawn’s second target, the dwarf planet Ceres, and results suggested a partially differentiated interior.
Park and his team recently applied a similar technique to Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io, using data acquired by NASA’s Juno and Galileo spacecraft during their flybys of the Jovian satellite as well as from ground-based observations. By measuring how Io’s gravity changes as it orbits Jupiter, which exerts a powerful tidal force, they revealed that the fiery moon is unlikely to possess a global magma ocean.
“Our technique isn’t restricted just to Io, Ceres, Vesta, or the Moon,” said Park. “There are many opportunities in the future to apply our technique for studying the interiors of intriguing planetary bodies throughout the solar system.”
News Media Contacts
Ian J. O’Neill
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-354-2649
ian.j.oneill@jpl.nasa.gov
Karen Fox / Molly Wasser
NASA Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / molly.l.wasser@nasa.gov
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Last Updated May 14, 2025 Related Terms
Vesta Dawn Earth's Moon GRAIL (Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory) Jet Propulsion Laboratory Planetary Science Small Bodies of the Solar System The Solar System Explore More
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By USH
Shape-Shifting Materials are advanced, adaptive materials capable of changing their physical form, embedding sensors and circuits directly into their structure, and even storing energy, all without traditional wiring. Lockheed Martin is at the forefront of developing these futuristic materials, raising questions about the possible extraterrestrial origin of this technology.
In a previous article, we discussed why suppressed exotic technologies are suddenly being disclosed. One company that frequently comes up in this conversation is Lockheed Martin, the American defense and aerospace giant known for pushing the boundaries of aviation and space innovation.
Imagine an aircraft that can grow its own skin, embed sensors into its body, store energy without wires, and even shift its shape mid-flight to adapt to changing conditions. This isn’t science fiction anymore, Lockheed Martin’s cutting-edge research is turning these futuristic concepts into reality.
But where is all this coming from?
The rapid development and creativity behind Lockheed Martin’s projects raise intriguing questions. Whistleblowers like David Grusch have recently alleged that Lockheed Martin has had access to recovered UFO materials for decades. Supporting this, Don Phillips, a former Lockheed engineer, confirmed years ago that exotic materials have been held and studied by the company since at least the 1950s.
This suggests that for over half a century, Lockheed has secretly been engaged in researching and reverse-engineering off-world technologies. It's possible that the breakthroughs we’re seeing today are the result of this hidden legacy. Ben Rich, former head of Lockheed’s Skunk Works division, famously hinted at this when he said, "We now have the technology to take ET home."
One particularly stunning development involves "smart" materials that behave almost like muscles, allowing aircraft structures to morph in real-time. These materials enable a craft to fine-tune its aerodynamics on the fly, adjusting instantly to turbulence, speed shifts, or mission-specific demands.
Lockheed’s innovations go even further. By embedding carbon nanotubes, extremely strong and highly conductive microscopic structure, directly into the material, they have created surfaces that can transfer information and power without traditional wiring. In these next-generation aircraft, the "skin" itself acts as the nervous system, the energy grid, and the sensor network all at once.
You can only imagine the kinds of technologies that have been developed over the years through the reverse engineering of exotic materials and recovered extraterrestrial craft. Yet, governments and space agencies remain tight-lipped about the existence of advanced alien civilizations, who likely introduced these techniques to Earth unintentionally.
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By European Space Agency
For decades, satellites have played a crucial role in our understanding of the remote polar regions. The ongoing loss of Antarctic ice, owing to the climate crisis, is, sadly, no longer surprising. However, satellites do more than just track the accelerating flow of glaciers towards the ocean and measure ice thickness.
New research highlights how ESA’s CryoSat mission has been used to uncover the hidden impact of subglacial lakes – vast reservoirs of water buried deep under the ice – that can suddenly drain into the ocean in dramatic outbursts and affect ice loss.
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By NASA
Hubble Space Telescope Hubble Home Overview About Hubble The History of Hubble Hubble Timeline Why Have a Telescope in Space? Hubble by the Numbers At the Museum FAQs Impact & Benefits Hubble’s Impact & Benefits Science Impacts Cultural Impact Technology Benefits Impact on Human Spaceflight Astro Community Impacts Science Hubble Science Science Themes Science Highlights Science Behind Discoveries Hubble’s Partners in Science Universe Uncovered Explore the Night Sky Observatory Hubble Observatory Hubble Design Mission Operations Missions to Hubble Hubble vs Webb Team Hubble Team Career Aspirations Hubble Astronauts News Hubble News Hubble News Archive Social Media Media Resources Multimedia Multimedia Images Videos Sonifications Podcasts e-Books Online Activities Lithographs Fact Sheets Glossary Posters Hubble on the NASA App More 35th Anniversary 6 Min Read NASA’s Hubble Traces Hidden History of Andromeda Galaxy
This photomosaic of the Andromeda galaxy is the largest ever assembled from Hubble observations. Credits:
NASA, ESA, Benjamin F. Williams (UWashington), Zhuo Chen (UWashington), L. Clifton Johnson (Northwestern); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI) In the years following the launch of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have tallied over 1 trillion galaxies in the universe. But only one galaxy stands out as the most important nearby stellar island to our Milky Way — the magnificent Andromeda galaxy (Messier 31). It can be seen with the naked eye on a very clear autumn night as a faint cigar-shaped object roughly the apparent angular diameter of our Moon.
A century ago, Edwin Hubble first established that this so-called “spiral nebula” was actually very far outside our own Milky Way galaxy — at a distance of approximately 2.5 million light-years or roughly 25 Milky Way diameters. Prior to that, astronomers had long thought that the Milky way encompassed the entire universe. Overnight, Hubble’s discovery turned cosmology upside down by unveiling an infinitely grander universe.
Now, a century later, the space telescope named for Hubble has accomplished the most comprehensive survey of this enticing empire of stars. The Hubble telescope is yielding new clues to the evolutionary history of Andromeda, and it looks markedly different from the Milky Way’s history.
This is largest photomosaic ever assembled from Hubble Space Telescope observations. It is a panoramic view of the neighboring Andromeda galaxy, located 2.5 million light-years away. It took over 10 years to make this vast and colorful portrait of the galaxy, requiring over 600 Hubble overlapping snapshots that were challenging to stitch together. The galaxy is so close to us, that in angular size it is six times the apparent diameter of the full Moon, and can be seen with the unaided eye. For Hubble’s pinpoint view, that’s a lot of celestial real estate to cover. This stunning, colorful mosaic captures the glow of 200 million stars. That’s still a fraction of Andromeda’s population. And the stars are spread across about 2.5 billion pixels. The detailed look at the resolved stars will help astronomers piece together the galaxy’s past history that includes mergers with smaller satellite galaxies. NASA, ESA, Benjamin F. Williams (UWashington), Zhuo Chen (UWashington), L. Clifton Johnson (Northwestern); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)
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Without Andromeda as a proxy for spiral galaxies in the universe at large, astronomers would know much less about the structure and evolution of our own Milky Way. That’s because we are embedded inside the Milky Way. This is like trying to understand the layout of New York City by standing in the middle of Central Park.
“With Hubble we can get into enormous detail about what’s happening on a holistic scale across the entire disk of the galaxy. You can’t do that with any other large galaxy,” said principal investigator Ben Williams of the University of Washington. Hubble’s sharp imaging capabilities can resolve more than 200 million stars in the Andromeda galaxy, detecting only stars brighter than our Sun. They look like grains of sand across the beach. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Andromeda’s total population is estimated to be 1 trillion stars, with many less massive stars falling below Hubble’s sensitivity limit.
Photographing Andromeda was a herculean task because the galaxy is a much bigger target on the sky than the galaxies Hubble routinely observes, which are often billions of light-years away. The full mosaic was carried out under two Hubble programs. In total, it required over 1,000 Hubble orbits, spanning more than a decade.
This panorama started with the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury (PHAT) program about a decade ago. Images were obtained at near-ultraviolet, visible, and near-infrared wavelengths using the Advanced Camera for Surveys and the Wide Field Camera 3 aboard Hubble to photograph the northern half of Andromeda.
This is the largest photomosaic ever made by the Hubble Space Telescope. The target is the vast Andromeda galaxy that is only 2.5 million light-years from Earth, making it the nearest galaxy to our own Milky Way. Andromeda is seen almost edge-on, tilted by 77 degrees relative to Earth’s view. The galaxy is so large that the mosaic is assembled from approximately 600 separate overlapping fields of view taken over 10 years of Hubble observing — a challenge to stitch together over such a large area. The mosaic image is made up of at least 2.5 billion pixels. Hubble resolves an estimated 200 million stars that are hotter than our Sun, but still a fraction of the galaxy’s total estimated stellar population. Interesting regions include: (a) Clusters of bright blue stars embedded within the galaxy, background galaxies seen much farther away, and photo-bombing by a couple bright foreground stars that are actually inside our Milky Way; (b) NGC 206 the most conspicuous star cloud in Andromeda; (c) A young cluster of blue newborn stars; (d) The satellite galaxy M32, that may be the residual core of a galaxy that once collided with Andromeda; (e) Dark dust lanes across myriad stars.
NASA, ESA, Benjamin F. Williams (UWashington), Zhuo Chen (UWashington), L. Clifton Johnson (Northwestern); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)
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This program was followed up by the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Southern Treasury (PHAST), recently published in The Astrophysical Journal and led by Zhuo Chen at the University of Washington, which added images of approximately 100 million stars in the southern half of Andromeda. This region is structurally unique and more sensitive to the galaxy’s merger history than the northern disk mapped by the PHAT survey.
The combined programs collectively cover the entire disk of Andromeda, which is seen almost edge-on — tilted by 77 degrees relative to Earth’s view. The galaxy is so large that the mosaic is assembled from approximately 600 separate fields of view. The mosaic image is made up of at least 2.5 billion pixels.
The complementary Hubble survey programs provide information about the age, heavy-element abundance, and stellar masses inside Andromeda. This will allow astronomers to distinguish between competing scenarios where Andromeda merged with one or more galaxies. Hubble’s detailed measurements constrain models of Andromeda’s merger history and disk evolution.
A Galactic ‘Train Wreck’
Though the Milky Way and Andromeda formed presumably around the same time many billions of years ago, observational evidence shows that they have very different evolutionary histories, despite growing up in the same cosmological neighborhood. Andromeda seems to be more highly populated with younger stars and unusual features like coherent streams of stars, say researchers. This implies it has a more active recent star-formation and interaction history than the Milky Way.
“Andromeda’s a train wreck. It looks like it has been through some kind of event that caused it to form a lot of stars and then just shut down,” said Daniel Weisz at the University of California, Berkeley. “This was probably due to a collision with another galaxy in the neighborhood.”
A possible culprit is the compact satellite galaxy Messier 32, which resembles the stripped-down core of a once-spiral galaxy that may have interacted with Andromeda in the past. Computer simulations suggest that when a close encounter with another galaxy uses up all the available interstellar gas, star formation subsides.
The Andromeda Galaxy, our closest galactic neighbor, holds over 1 trillion stars and has been a key to unlocking the secrets of the universe. Thanks to NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, we’re now seeing Andromeda in stunning new detail, revealing its dynamic history and unique structure.
Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center; Lead Producer: Paul Morris
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“Andromeda looks like a transitional type of galaxy that’s between a star-forming spiral and a sort of elliptical galaxy dominated by aging red stars,” said Weisz. “We can tell it’s got this big central bulge of older stars and a star-forming disk that’s not as active as you might expect given the galaxy’s mass.”
“This detailed look at the resolved stars will help us to piece together the galaxy’s past merger and interaction history,” added Williams.
Hubble’s new findings will support future observations by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and the upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Essentially a wide-angle version of Hubble (with the same sized mirror), Roman will capture the equivalent of at least 100 high-resolution Hubble images in a single exposure. These observations will complement and extend Hubble’s huge dataset.
The Hubble Space Telescope has been operating for over three decades and continues to make ground-breaking discoveries that shape our fundamental understanding of the universe. Hubble is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope and mission operations. Lockheed Martin Space, based in Denver, also supports mission operations at Goddard. The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, conducts Hubble science operations for NASA.
Explore More
Explore the Night Sky: Messier 31
Hubble’s High-Definition Panoramic View of the Andromeda Galaxy
NASA’s Hubble Finds Giant Halo Around the Andromeda Galaxy
Facebook logo @NASAHubble @NASAHubble Instagram logo @NASAHubble Media Contact:
Claire Andreoli (claire.andreoli@nasa.gov)
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD
Ray Villard
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD
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Last Updated Jan 16, 2025 Editor Andrea Gianopoulos Location NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Related Terms
Andromeda Galaxy Astrophysics Astrophysics Division Galaxies Goddard Space Flight Center Hubble Space Telescope Spiral Galaxies The Universe Keep Exploring Discover More Topics From Hubble
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Since its 1990 launch, the Hubble Space Telescope has changed our fundamental understanding of the universe.
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