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NASA’s Perseverance rover is hightailing it to a fascinating river delta region in the Jezero Crater on Mars. But to get there, it first had to pass near its original landing site. Images from there are a trip down memory lane, back to when Percy dramatically landed on the red planet in February 2021.

Steve Ruff, Arizona State University associate research professor and Mars geologist, runs the Mars Guy channel on YouTube. He posted a video on Sunday recapping the rover’s arrival on mars and what happened to the parachute and back shell — two key components of the landing system that delivered Percy safely to the surface.

Can the US and Russia still collaborate in space?

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The International Space Station has been orbiting above us for the last 20 years. It’s been home to astronauts from more than a dozen different countries — but mostly Americans and Russians. The two former “Space Race” countries control the main parts of the station. The science done there has required close collaboration and so it’s been largely insulated from politics on Earth.

But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine may change that. The two countries have agreed to cooperate through 2024… but after that, the future of the space station is uncertain.

Like something out of a sci-fi movie, the Hubble Space Telescope discovered the most distant star ever seen—through a cosmic fluke.

Nicknamed “Earendel,” the star’s light took 12.9 billion years to reach Earth, and scientists believe it emitted light throughout the first billion years of our universe’s existence. Beside its age, Earendel’s position is also curious. According to NASA, Hubble was able to detect the star thanks to gravitational lensing, a phenomenon in which a massive object (like a galaxy) warps the fabric of space. When light reaches the warped space, it can act like a magnifying glass and highlight objects we’d otherwise have a difficult time seeing.

And that’s how Earendel—whose Old English name is akin to “morning star” or “rising light”—was found (though Tolkien fans will recognize it as a riff on Eärendil, the half-Elven seafarer who carried a Silmaril).

The system developed in Milano is robust and it also has the potential to process information encoded in different coupled systems, including far and enormous galaxies. Thanks to these new results, it is now possible to simulate in the lab complex coupled systems, with order altered by stable defects, difficult to be reproduced otherwise since involving ginormous scale, like galaxies, or part of extreme hydrodynamic systems.


Water whirlpools, smoke rings, violent tornados and spiral galaxies are all examples of twists in fluids, although very different each other. Analogous twists, but in the realm of light, have been created by the research group coordinated by Antonio Ambrosio at the IIT-Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (Italian Institute of Technology), in Milano (Italy). The results, published in the journal Nature Photonics, show the realization of 100 light vortices, coupled to form an ordered structure, a light crystal.

Mutual interaction of light and nanostructured materials is the focus of the research of Antonio Ambrosio, Principal Investigator of the research line Vectorial Nano-imaging at IIT in Milano and grantee of the ERC Consolidator project “METAmorphoses.”

Twisted light generators have been developed in the last few years, but they typically create a single vortex propagating alone in . IIT researchers have shown instead that it is possible to create 100 light vortices, coupled into an ordered light crystal.