Thanks for a powerful antioxidant, Deinococcus radiodurans can withstand radiation doses 28,000 times greater than what would kill a human. In a new study, scientists discovered how the antioxidant works. Finding could drive the development of designer antioxidants to shield astronauts from cosmic radiation.

Encountering Neptune in 1989, NASA's Voyager mission completed humankind's first close-up exploration of the four giant outer planets of our solar system. Collectively, since their launch in 1977, the twin Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft discovered that Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune were far more complex than scientists had imagined. There was a lot more to be learned.

A NASA Hubble Space Telescope observation program called OPAL (Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy) obtains long-term baseline observations of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune in order to understand their atmospheric dynamics and evolution.

In a paper appearing in the journal Nature, an international team including University of Liège astronomers report the detection of 138 new decameter rocky bodies in the main asteroid belt. The space rocks range in size from that of a bus to a few hundred meters wide, and are the smallest asteroids within the main belt that have been detected to date. This discovery was made possible by an innovative analysis of archival infrared images initially devoted to the study of the TRAPPIST-1 exoplanetary system collected by the world’s most powerful observatory — the NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). This discovery has important implications for the understanding of the asteroid population of the main belt and the Earth planetary defense against dangerous asteroids.

MIT astronomers have found a way to spot the smallest, “decameter,” asteroids within the main asteroid belt. They used their approach to detect more than 100 new asteroids, ranging from the size of a bus to several stadiums wide, which are the smallest asteroids within the main belt detected to date.