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By NASA
This artist’s concept shows Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Mark 1 lander and NASA’s VIPER (Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover) on the lunar surface.Credit: Courtesy of Blue Origin As part of the agency’s Artemis campaign, NASA has awarded Blue Origin of Kent, Washington, a CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) task order with an option to deliver a rover to the Moon’s South Pole region. NASA’s VIPER (Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover) will search for volatile resources, such as ice, on the lunar surface and collect science data to support future exploration at the Moon and Mars.
“NASA is leading the world in exploring more of the Moon than ever before, and this delivery is just one of many ways we’re leveraging U.S. industry to support a long-term American presence on the lunar surface,” said acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy. “Our rover will explore the extreme environment of the lunar South Pole, traveling to small, permanently shadowed regions to help inform future landing sites for our astronauts and better understand the Moon’s environment – important insights for sustaining humans over longer missions, as America leads our future in space.”
The CLPS task order has a total potential value of $190 million. This is the second CLPS lunar delivery awarded to Blue Origin. Their first delivery – using their Blue Moon Mark 1 (MK1) robotic lander – is targeted for launch later this year to deliver NASA’s Stereo Cameras for Lunar-Plume Surface Studies and Laser Retroreflective Array payloads to the Moon’s South Pole region.
With this new award, Blue Origin will deliver VIPER to the lunar surface in late 2027, using a second Blue Moon MK1 lander, which is in production. NASA previously canceled the VIPER project and has since explored alternative approaches to achieve the agency’s goals of mapping potential off-planet resources, like water.
“NASA is committed to studying and exploring the Moon, including learning more about water on the lunar surface, to help determine how we can harness local resources for future human exploration,” said Nicky Fox, associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters in Washington. “We’ve been looking for creative, cost-effective approaches to accomplish these exploration goals. This private sector-developed landing capability enables this delivery and focuses our investments accordingly – supporting American leadership in space and ensuring our long-term exploration is robust and affordable.”
The task order, called CS-7, has an award base to design the payload-specific accommodations and to demonstrate how Blue Origin’s flight design will off-load the rover to the lunar surface. There is an option on the contract to deliver and safely deploy the rover to the Moon’s surface. NASA will make the decision to exercise that option after the execution and review of the base task and of Blue Origin’s first flight of the Blue Moon MK1 lander. This unique approach will reduce the agency’s cost and technical risk. The rover has a targeted science window for its 100-day mission that requires a landing by late 2027.
Blue Origin is responsible for the complete landing mission architecture and will conduct design, analysis, and testing of a large lunar lander capable of safely delivering the lunar volatiles science rover to the Moon. Blue Origin also will handle end-to-end payload integration, planning and support, and post-landing payload deployment activities. NASA will conduct rover operations and science planning.
“The search for lunar volatiles plays a key role in NASA’s exploration of the Moon, with important implications for both science and human missions under Artemis,” said Joel Kearns, deputy associate administrator for exploration, Science Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters. “This delivery could show us where ice is most likely to be found and easiest to access, as a future resource for humans. And by studying these sources of lunar water, we also gain valuable insight into the distribution and origin of volatiles across the solar system, helping us better understand the processes that have shaped our space environment and how our inner solar system has evolved.”
Through CLPS, American companies continue to demonstrate leadership in commercial space advancing capabilities and accomplishing NASA’s goal for a commercial lunar economy. NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley led the VIPER rover development and will lead its science investigations, and NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston provided rover engineering development for Ames.
To learn more about CLPS and Artemis, visit:
https://www.nasa.gov/clps
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Alise Fisher
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-2546
alise.m.fisher@nasa.gov
Kenna Pell / Nilufar Ramji
Johnson Space Center, Houston
281-483-5111
kenna.m.pell@nasa.gov / nilufar.ramji@nasa.gov
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Last Updated Sep 19, 2025 LocationNASA Headquarters Related Terms
VIPER (Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover) Ames Research Center Artemis Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) Johnson Space Center Science Mission Directorate View the full article
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By European Space Agency
Hidden beneath the biggest ice mass on Earth, hundreds of subglacial lakes form a crucial part of Antarctica’s icy structure, affecting the movement and stability of glaciers, and consequentially influencing global sea level rise.
Thanks to a decade of data from the European Space Agency’s CryoSat satellite, researchers have identified 85 previously unknown lakes several kilometres under the frozen surface surrounding the South Pole. This increases the number of known active subglacial lakes below Antarctica by more than half to 231.
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By NASA
An artist’s concept of a supermassive black hole, a surrounding disk of material falling towards the black hole and a jet containing particles moving away at close to the speed of light. This black hole represents a recently-discovered quasar powered by a black hole. New Chandra observations indicate that the black hole is growing at a rate that exceeds the usual limit for black holes, called the Eddington Limit. Credit: NASA/CXC/SAO/M. WeissX-ray: NASA/CXC/INAF-Brera/L. Ighina et al.; Illustration: NASA/CXC/SAO/M. Weiss; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/N. Wolk A black hole is growing at one of the fastest rates ever recorded, according to a team of astronomers. This discovery from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory may help explain how some black holes can reach enormous masses relatively quickly after the big bang.
The black hole weighs about a billion times the mass of the Sun and is located about 12.8 billion light-years from Earth, meaning that astronomers are seeing it only 920 million years after the universe began. It is producing more X-rays than any other black hole seen in the first billion years of the universe.
The black hole is powering what scientists call a quasar, an extremely bright object that outshines entire galaxies. The power source of this glowing monster is large amounts of matter funneling around and entering the black hole.
While the same team discovered it two years ago, it took observations from Chandra in 2023 to discover what sets this quasar, RACS J0320-35, apart. The X-ray data reveal that this black hole appears to be growing at a rate that exceeds the normal limit for these objects.
“It was a bit shocking to see this black hole growing by leaps and bounds,” said Luca Ighina of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who led the study.
When matter is pulled toward a black hole it is heated and produces intense radiation over a broad spectrum, including X-rays and optical light. This radiation creates pressure on the infalling material. When the rate of infalling matter reaches a critical value, the radiation pressure balances the black hole’s gravity, and matter cannot normally fall inwards any more rapidly. That maximum is referred to as the Eddington limit.
Scientists think that black holes growing more slowly than the Eddington limit need to be born with masses of about 10,000 Suns or more so they can reach a billion solar masses within a billion years after the big bang — as has been observed in RACS J0320-35. A black hole with such a high birth mass could directly result from an exotic process: the collapse of a huge cloud of dense gas containing unusually low amounts of elements heavier than helium, conditions that may be extremely rare.
If RACS J0320-35 is indeed growing at a high rate — estimated at 2.4 times the Eddington limit — and has done so for a sustained amount of time, its black hole could have started out in a more conventional way, with a mass less than a hundred Suns, caused by the implosion of a massive star.
“By knowing the mass of the black hole and working out how quickly it’s growing, we’re able to work backward to estimate how massive it could have been at birth,” said co-author Alberto Moretti of INAF-Osservatorio Astronomico di Brera in Italy. “With this calculation we can now test different ideas on how black holes are born.”
To figure out how fast this black hole is growing (between 300 and 3,000 Suns per year), the researchers compared theoretical models with the X-ray signature, or spectrum, from Chandra, which gives the amounts of X-rays at different energies. They found the Chandra spectrum closely matched what they expected from models of a black hole growing faster than the Eddington limit. Data from optical and infrared light also supports the interpretation that this black hole is packing on weight faster than the Eddington limit allows.
“How did the universe create the first generation of black holes?” said co-author Thomas of Connor, also of the Center for Astrophysics. “This remains one of the biggest questions in astrophysics and this one object is helping us chase down the answer.”
Another scientific mystery addressed by this result concerns the cause of jets of particles that move away from some black holes at close to the speed of light, as seen in RACS J0320-35. Jets like this are rare for quasars, which may mean that the rapid rate of growth of the black hole is somehow contributing to the creation of these jets.
The quasar was previously discovered as part of a radio telescope survey using the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder, combined with optical data from the Dark Energy Camera, an instrument mounted on the Victor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. The U.S. National Science Foundation National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory’s Gemini-South Telescope on Cerro Pachon, Chile was used to obtain the accurate distance of RACS J0320-35.
A paper describing these results has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal and is available here.
NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, manages the Chandra program. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory’s Chandra X-ray Center controls science operations from Cambridge, and flight operations from Burlington, Massachusetts.
Read more from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory Learn more about the Chandra X-ray Observatory and its mission here:
https://www.nasa.gov/chandra
https://chandra.si.edu
Visual Description
This release features a quasar located 12.8 billion light-years from Earth, presented as an artist’s illustration and an X-ray image from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.
In the artist’s illustration, the quasar, RACS J0320-35, sits at our upper left, filling the left side of the image. It resembles a spiraling, motion-blurred disk of orange, red, and yellow streaks. At the center of the disk, surrounded by a glowing, sparking, brilliant yellow light, is a black egg shape. This is a black hole, one of the fastest-growing black holes ever detected. The black hole is also shown in a small Chandra X-ray image inset at our upper right. In that depiction, the black hole appears as a white dot with an outer ring of neon purple.
The artist’s illustration also highlights a jet of particles blasting away from the black hole at the center of the quasar. The streaked silver beam starts at the core of the distant quasar, near our upper left, and shoots down toward our lower right. The blurry beam of energetic particles appears to widen as it draws closer and exits the image.
News Media Contact
Megan Watzke
Chandra X-ray Center
Cambridge, Mass.
617-496-7998
mwatzke@cfa.harvard.edu
Corinne Beckinger
Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama
256-544-0034
corinne.m.beckinger@nasa.gov
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Last Updated Sep 18, 2025 EditorLee MohonContactCorinne M. Beckingercorinne.m.beckinger@nasa.govLocationMarshall Space Flight Center Related Terms
Chandra X-Ray Observatory Astrophysics Black Holes Galaxies, Stars, & Black Holes Galaxies, Stars, & Black Holes Research Marshall Astrophysics Marshall Space Flight Center Quasars Science & Research Supermassive Black Holes The Universe Explore More
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