Understanding what’s inside of a planet is like trying to figure out what’s inside of a gift without unwrapping it. But because we can’t simply tear open a planet, instead, we must rely on secondary evidence, like the waves generated by geologic events.

Seismology — the study of quakes and seismic waves — lets us take “images” of the interiors of planets. NASA’s Viking landers brought the first seismometers to Mars in 1976, but they were plagued by noise, which rendered them largely ineffective. It took more than 40 years until Mars hosted another mission equipped with a quake-measuring instrument: NASA’s InSight lander.

And although InSight is expected to retire later this year, ever since the lander touched down in 2018, this stationary surveyor has been studying marsquakes, slowly unveiling the interior of the Red Planet.

Using NASA’s Fermi space telescope, Chinese astronomers have investigated a newly discovered millisecond pulsar known as PSR J1835−3259B. As a result, they identified gamma-ray pulsations from this source. The finding is reported in a paper published June 27 on the arXiv pre-print server.

Pulsars are highly magnetized, rotating neutron stars emitting a beam of electromagnetic radiation. The most rapidly rotating pulsars, with rotation periods below 30 milliseconds, are known as millisecond pulsars (MSPs). Astronomers assume that they are formed in binary systems when the initially more massive component turns into a neutron star that is then spun up due to accretion of matter from the secondary star.

PSR J1835−3259B is a recently discovered MSP in the globular cluster NGC 6652. It has a spin period of approximately 1.83 milliseconds and is in a nearly circular orbit of about 28.7 hours within the cluster. The distance to the pulsar is estimated to be some 32,600 light years.

It’s time to #UnfoldTheUniverse. Watch as the mission team reveals the long-awaited first images from the James Webb Space Telescope. Webb, an international collaboration led by NASA with our partners the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency, is the biggest telescope ever launched into space. It will unlock mysteries in our solar system, look beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probe the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it.

All about Webb: https://webb.nasa.gov/

With the first half of 2022 coming to a close, NASA teams are continuing work to resolve the Lucy spacecraft’s solar array issue following its October 2021 launch. Lucy is a first-of-a-kind mission to visit several asteroids in Jupiter’s L4 and L5 Lagrange points. Currently, Lucy is coasting before its first flyby of Earth in October 2022.

Lucy’s sister mission, Psyche, has experienced compatibility issues causing a delay to a No-Earlier-Than (NET) July 2023 launch. Psyche is another first-of-a-kind mission to orbit the main asteroid belt object, 16 Psyche. Both Lucy and Psyche operate under NASA’s Discovery program.

A team of engineers at the University of Arizona has an ambitious concept for a motorless sailplane that may soar above the Martian surface. They want to go higher.