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Space & Planetary

Updates every hour. Last Updated: 19-Jun-2026 20:15 ET (20-Jun-2026 00:15 GMT/UTC)

SwRI-led Lucy mission reveals wobbling peanut asteroid

Southwest Research Institute
Peer-Reviewed Publication

SAN ANTONIO — June 18, 2026 — Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) scientists studying the inner main belt asteroid Donaldjohanson have found that its rotation wobbles. Rather than rolling through space in a steady pattern, Donaldjohanson turns on two axes, rotating end-over-end once every 10.5 Earth days while wobbling around its horizontal axis then once every 26.5 days.

Journal: Science

Spacecraft flyby offers clues to the history of the small asteroid Donaldjohanson

American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
Peer-Reviewed Publication

A spacecraft flyby of the inner main belt asteroid Donaldjohanson captured details about the small asteroid’s surface features and motion that clarify its origin and evolution, report Simone Marchi and colleagues. As part of a 12-year mission to visit 8 asteroids, in April 2025 the Lucy spacecraft – named after a hominin fossil uncovered by paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson – flew past the asteroid. The asteroid’s orbit indicates it is a likely member of the Erigone asteroid family, a group of asteroids that were produced by a catastrophic collision that broke up a larger parent body. Images of Donaldjohanson taken during the flyby show that it consists of two cratered lobes connected by a relatively smooth neck. The density of craters is consistent with the age of the Erigone family, which is about 155 million years old. However, craters smaller than 0.4 kilometers in diameter seem to have been preferentially erased from the asteroid, say Marchi et al., who suggest that those craters might have been wiped away by seismic shaking after a more recent impact event. The asteroid has a slow tumbling movement, not simple rotation, which could have been gradually produced by torques driven by thermal radiation. Spectra of the asteroid’s surface are similar to other carbonaceous Erigone family asteroids and reveal the presence of iron-bearing phyllosilicates, indicating partial alteration of the minerals by liquid water on the parent body, which likely halted at an early stage due to insufficient water or heat.

Journal: Science

Studies trace coordination of rotating brain waves

University of Washington School of Medicine/UW Medicine
Peer-Reviewed Publication

A new kind of brain wave has been discovered that specifically rotates over space and time, relies on a circular anatomical circuit in the sensory cortex, and impacts activity across the brain. The findings were made in mouse studies. Scientists hope to learn whether these rotating traveling waves play a global role in sensing and interpreting internal and external stimuli, in laying down memory, and in managing motor performance. The researchers have yet to determine if rotating traveling waves are coordinated globally to the same extent in other species, including humans, as they are in mice.

Journal: Science
Funder: Pew Charitable Trusts, Klingenstein-Simons Fellowship Award

Famous “Pink Planet” harbors a salty surprise

Northwestern University
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Found in 2013, Pink Planet was too faint to study with ground-based telescopes. In new study, scientists used JWST and advanced processing methods to obtain its spectrum for the first time. Observations provided some of the first direct evidence for salt clouds in a cold object atmosphere. Pink Planet could be a giant planet or brown dwarf, so astronomers refer to it as a ‘planetary-mass companion’.

Journal: The Astronomical Journal
Funder: NASA Headquarters

A century-old concrete formula gets a long-overdue update for the modern age

Bentham Science Publishers
Peer-Reviewed Publication

A new study published in The Open Civil Engineering Journal by Dr. Chenhui Jiang of the Department of Construction Engineering, Zhejiang College of Construction, Hangzhou, China, takes one of civil engineering's most foundational rules and brings it into the present. Abrams' Law — a relationship between concrete's water-to-cement ratio and its compressive strength, first set out by Duff Abrams in 1918 — has guided concrete mix design for over a century. But as the construction industry has increasingly adopted fly ash, a byproduct of coal-fired power plants, as a partial substitute for Portland cement, the original formula has shown clear limitations. It simply was not designed with such mineral additives in mind, and applying it directly to fly ash concrete can produce inaccurate strength predictions, complicating the design of safe and sustainable structures.

Journal: The Open Civil Engineering Journal

Full-space inverse-designed meta-optics for complex vector field shaping of intracavity landscapes

Light Publishing Center, Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics And Physics, CAS
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Precise shaping of three-dimensional vector fields inside enclosed optical cavities has long been a critical unresolved bottleneck in modern photonics, essential for super-resolution imaging, nanolasers and advanced quantum photonic technologies. To address this, scientists in China invented a novel full-space adjoint-enabled freeform meta-optics framework, realizing 5-fold imaging fidelity enhancement while retaining λ/5 optical super-resolution. This technique opens new avenues for cutting-edge nanophotonics, topological photonics and quantum optics applications.

Journal: Light Science & Applications
Funder: National Natural Science Foundation of China, Youth Innovation Promotion Association of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Science and Technology Innovation Program of Hunan Province

Mars mission: a stress test for the search for life

Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Starting in 2030, ESA’s rover Rosalind Franklin will search for traces of life on Mars. The MPS is contributing a scientific instrument to the mission. It determines, among other things, a crucial property of organic molecules: their chirality. This reveals whether the molecules were ever part of a living organism. In preparation, researchers from the MPS and the Universities of Göttingen and Côte d’Azur have successfully used this principle for the first time to analyse two particularly relevant chemical compounds in meteorite samples. The measurements also reveal evidence that meteorites “collect” remnants of fossil fuels as they plunge through the Earth’s atmosphere.

Journal: Earth and Planetary Science Letters

New JWST images of abnormally well-developed galaxy cluster open up the “cosmic noon” frontier

Caltech IPAC
Peer-Reviewed Publication

A stunningly concentrated and hefty galaxy cluster, from a time in the universe’s history when such massive structures aren’t expected to have fully formed yet, is challenging cosmic evolution theories. Across a series of three recent papers, a team led by researchers from IPAC—a science and data center for astrophysics and planetary science at Caltech—have revealed that the cluster is the most distant example of strong gravitational lensing with a galaxy cluster. The new results, based on observations from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), were presented in a press conference on June 17, 2026 at the 248th meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

Journal: The Astrophysical Journal Letters

UofL, UofL Health and Kosair for Kids open expanded Pediatric NeuroRecovery Center

University of Louisville
Business Announcement

The University of Louisville, UofL Health and Kosair for Kids today celebrated the grand opening and ribbon cutting of the newly expanded Kosair for Kids Center for Pediatric NeuroRecovery, a transformative milestone in pediatric rehabilitation, research and care. The 13,631-square-foot, state-of-the-art facility brings clinical care, therapy and research together in one space, creating a first-of-its-kind environment designed to accelerate recovery and expand access for children with spinal cord injuries and other neurological conditions.

Funder: Kosair for Kids, Health Resources and Services Administration

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