The continuation of AI chatbots arriving in CarPlay, Apple’s opt-in approach to using customer data for AI training, and turmoil surrounding WordPress leadership are the topics for this MacVoices Live! discussion. The conversation also examines Bending Spoons’ latest billion-dollar acquisition, Apple’s international iCloud+ bundles, the potential for services to expand Apple’s global ecosystem, and Michael Dell’s support for new youth investment accounts.
Detective work by a team of space-weather experts has discovered the truth about a historical event that had been thought to be the first-ever case of technological disruption by geomagnetic activity from the sun, but has now been shown to have taken place seven years later.
From it being too hot or too wet to leaves on the track or cows on the line, there's a fine tradition of what the British public consider to be flimsy excuses for delays on the trains. Yet an 1871 edition of the journal Nature describes a very different event that caused a train departing Exeter, in Devon on the south-west coast of the U.K., to be delayed by 16 minutes: a solar storm that flooded the railway signals' electrical telegraph network with current.
"The Exeter train delay is a fascinating story because it sits right at the point where emerging technologies first began to encounter the realities of the space environment," said Jim Wild, who is a professor of space physics at Lancaster University and also the President of the Royal Astronomical Society, in a statement.
The event has frequently been cited as the first example of a solar storm disrupting technology on Earth, but when a team led by Wild went back through historical records to investigate further, they found that things didn't add up.
The original report in Nature stated that the electrical disturbance occurred at 10:05pm local time on Oct. 18, 1841. However, Wild's team found that particular train line didn't open until 1846.
So, they delved deeper into the history books to figure out the truth.
"Our research has a hint of a detective story — piecing together a wide range of archived records to better understand a historically severe space-weather event," said team-member Mike Hapgood, a space weather expert at RAL Space, which is the UK's National Space Laboratory, in Oxfordshire.
Combining data from railway timetables, old newspapers, plus historic reports of solar observations and the northern lights and digitized geomagnetic data, Wild and Hapgood's team were able to conclude that the most likely date for the train delay was Oct. 18, 1848, which coincided with a strong solar storm that hit Earth.
This revised date knocks it off top spot in the chronological list of such events. The first recorded disruption to electrical technologies is now a disturbance on the Midland railway network, which had lines covering much of the U.K., in March 1847.
"Although this means it is not the earliest recorded space weather impact, it remains one of the first clear examples of solar activity disrupting critical infrastructure," Wild said. "It also demonstrates the value of combining scientific records with contemporary newspaper reports and archival documents when reconstructing historic space weather events."
Solar storms have been playing havoc with electrical technology on Earth since the 1840s. (Image credit: NASA/SDO)
The case reminds us that space weather has been a hazard to technology and modern systems for a long time, and isn't just a recent problem.
"Society has been experiencing the effects of space weather on technology for almost as long as electrical technologies have existed," said Wild.
The most dramatic example is the aforementioned Carrington event of 1859, representing the most significant solar storm on record as it caused telegraph poles to spark and battery power supplies to be disrupted. By this point, telegraph operators had grown used to electrical disturbances associated with auroral activity, but even the Carrington storm shocked them — quite literally in some cases, as extra current ran down the telegraph lines — with its ferocity. Should a similar event occur today, it would cause huge black outs, knock out power grids, disrupt communications and fry satellites.
"While today's space weather [monitoring] capabilities are far more advanced than anything available in the 1800s, the modern technologies we depend on are also much more vulnerable to solar storms," said Hapgood.
The current solar cycle 25 peaked in Oct. 2024 and we are just beginning to come out of an extended period of maximum activity. However, it remains to be seen how the rest of this cycle will play out before reaching solar minimum in about 2030. We've already seen severe geomagnetic storms caused by space weather in May 2024 — will we experience another powerful storm before the decade is out?
Although the famous Carrington Event of 1859 is often described as the first major space weather event to affect technology, earlier incidents did occur. Historical records show that telegraph systems were disrupted by geomagnetic storms as early as the late 1840s.
iPhone 18 Pro is at the center of What Holds Us, a new photography exhibition built around three very different approaches to image-making. Alex Prager, Jack Davison, and Jimmy Chin shot the entire project on Apple’s latest Pro iPhone, using the device in environments ranging from a Los Angeles soundstage to a London warehouse and the high-altitude terrain of British Columbia.
Curated by Kathy Ryan, the former longtime director of photography for The New York Times Magazine, the exhibition examines connection through touch, shared experience, physical environments, and human relationships.
It also gives Apple a more ambitious showcase for the iPhone 18 Pro camera than a conventional product demonstration. Rather than presenting standardized comparisons or individual sample images. What Holds Us asks three established photographers to work within their own visual languages while using the phone as their sole camera.
The exhibition opens in New York City on September 18 and runs through September 20 before traveling to London and Shanghai in the coming months.
Image Credit: Apple Inc.
iPhone 18 Pro takes three very different photographic approaches
The project works partly because the three photographers have little stylistically in common.
Jimmy Chin took iPhone 18 Pro into the Bugaboo Mountains of southeastern British Columbia, working around snow, ice, steep climbing terrain, and winds reaching as high as 70 miles per hour.
His series focuses on trust and connection within climbing, with veteran mountaineer Conrad Anker appearing throughout the photographs. Some images place Anker as a small figure against vast mountain landscapes, while others move much closer to rock, snow, and glacial textures.
Chin used both the 48MP Fusion Ultra Wide and Telephoto cameras to shift between those extremes. The practical appeal was also straightforward: carrying a phone instead of a full conventional camera setup reduced the equipment required in an environment where weight and mobility affect every decision.
Jack Davison took almost the opposite approach. Shooting inside a former sugar warehouse in London, he created intimate portraits built around people interacting with clay and chalk.
Davison is known for high-contrast black-and-white imagery, and his contribution emphasizes texture, shadows, highlights, skin, and physical contact with the material. Some subjects appear partly covered in clay, while others manipulate it directly, leaving fingerprints and marks across the compositions.
For Davison, the smaller camera changed the relationship between photographer and subject. Without a large camera constantly positioned in front of his face, he could maintain more eye contact and work at closer range.
His use of slower shutter speeds, RAW capture, and multiple lenses also illustrates how Apple increasingly wants the Pro iPhone camera to function as a configurable photographic tool rather than simply a computational point-and-shoot system.
Alex Prager pushes the phone into large-scale production
Alex Prager’s section places iPhone 18 Pro inside a much more elaborate production environment.
Working on a Los Angeles soundstage, Prager created color-heavy scenes filled with crowds, confetti, staged city elements, costumes, and loosely choreographed movement. Some images use high viewpoints to turn groups of people into a continuous visual pattern, while tighter photographs isolate individual figures within the same constructed world.
The visual approach resembles film production more than spontaneous mobile photography, which gives the project another test for the phone. The camera has to preserve detail across numerous faces, costumes, props, highlights, and areas of movement while operating within scenes deliberately designed for large-format presentation.
Prager also treated the camera’s immediacy as part of the creative process rather than simply a convenience. The ease of moving between perspectives and capturing repeated moments allowed the scenes to evolve through improvisation instead of being locked into a single carefully prepared frame.
That approach aligns with a recurring theme across the exhibition: the phone becomes less intrusive without requiring the photographers to abandon their existing visual standards.
For Apple, it is a useful distinction. Professional photography campaigns built around smartphones can easily become exercises in technical proof, where the central question is whether a phone can imitate equipment already available to photographers. What Holds Us is more interested in how a smaller camera changes the way an artist works.
Image Credit: Apple Inc.
Variable aperture gives the project a new technical foundation
The exhibition arrives alongside one of Apple’s most significant physical camera changes in years.
iPhone 18 Pro introduces variable aperture on its 48MP Fusion Main camera. The lens can operate at ƒ/1.48, ƒ/1.8, ƒ/2.8, or ƒ/4.0, changing both light intake and depth of field.
A wider ƒ/1.48 aperture is designed for stronger low-light performance, while narrower settings can retain more detail across different planes of an image. Apple also lets photographers select aperture settings manually through new Pro controls in the Camera app.
Those controls extend to shutter speed and white balance, with a histogram available for monitoring exposure. ProRAW remains available for photographers who want greater flexibility during post-production.
The rear camera system also includes 48MP Fusion Ultra Wide and 48MP Fusion Telephoto cameras, providing focal lengths from 13mm at the wide end through an optical-quality 8x option.
What Holds Us does not reduce the exhibition to those specifications, but the technical changes help explain why Apple chose photography, rather than video, for this particular campaign. Variable aperture affects choices that photographers traditionally make during capture, especially around available light and how much of a scene remains in focus.
What Holds Us extends the Shot on iPhone idea
Apple has spent years using Shot on iPhone campaigns to demonstrate camera quality through finished work rather than charts and controlled tests. What Holds Us pushes that format closer to a conventional curated exhibition.
Ryan connects the three bodies of work through the idea of human presence, but each artist interprets it differently. Chin finds it through dependence between climbers in hostile landscapes. Davison uses physical contact between people and clay. Prager builds populated fictional environments in which individual expressions emerge from larger crowds.
The images therefore function as an exhibition first and a hardware showcase second, even though the production is closely tied to the launch of iPhone 18 Pro.
That balance may be the most effective part of the campaign. Apple does not need to demonstrate that a modern iPhone can produce a technically competent photograph. The more interesting challenge is showing where its smaller size, computational processing, lens flexibility, RAW workflow, and new manual controls can alter the photographer’s decisions.
New York visitors will get the first opportunity to see how those images hold up away from a phone or computer display when What Holds Us opens September 18. After its three-day New York run, Apple says the exhibition will continue to London and Shanghai, giving the iPhone 18 Pro photography project a physical life beyond the launch campaign.
A zoomed-in view of the Moon made from images from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera. (More information at the bottom of article.)
Credits: NASA Goddard/Intuitive Machines/Robert Wagner
It started as a routine data-quality check. But as Robert Wagner, a scientist with NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), scanned a giant Moon map on his computer screen, an unusually large bright spot circled by a dark halo caught his eye, as it implied that surface material in that area had been shaken up.
“I just stopped, dropped everything, and started looking into what that spot was,” said Wagner, an image-processing specialist from Intuitive Machines who works with data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) system.
By comparing before and after images of the Moon, Wagner realized he had discovered the largest, newly formed crater ever found in the solar system, as scientists reported Wednesday in Science Advances. This discovery highlights the value of NASA’s Moon orbiter data in studying a dynamic landscape as the agency advances a sustained human presence and expanded scientific and commercial activity on the Moon.
A zoomed-in view of McGetchin crater, circled on the left, next to a “before” image on the right. The panel on the left is made from images captured by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Wide-Angle Camera in summer 2025; the right panel was made from images taken in spring 2011. The white spot is not the crater itself, but rather material flung out of the crater, which formed when a rock, possibly this size of a three- to six‑story building, crashed into the Moon between April 11 and May 22, 2024 – a once-in-a-century event, as scientists reported on Sept. 15, 2026, in a pair of papers in Science Advances. The area shown in the images is 38 miles wide.
NASA Goddard/Intuitive Machines/Robert Wagner
Officially named McGetchin after pioneering lunar scientist Tom McGetchin, the crater formed on the Moon’s eastern edge sometime between April 11 and May 22, 2024, after a comet or asteroid the size of a three- to six-story building hit the surface.
The crash left a crater, 728 feet wide, that spans the length of two football fields. And at 141 feet deep, the crater could fit three vertically stacked yellow school buses.
Scientists estimate that an impact of this magnitude happens on the Moon about once in a century or even longer.
Moon takes some hits
For more than 17 years, LRO has been circling the Moon and using its seven instruments to map the topography, surface composition, temperature, and radiation environment there. The spacecraft’s team has identified at least 1,000 new impact craters throughout the mission and flagged 100,000 more surface changes from an object smashing into the Moon or from the debris that flung out after.
With no atmosphere to slow them or burn them up, space rocks and other objects easily reach the lunar surface. Most are much smaller compared to the object that carved out McGetchin crater. The smallest craters scientists can distinguish from LRO images are about 30 feet wide, the length of a three-story building laid on its side, made by rocks about 43 inches wide, the size of a monster-truck tire. Scientists estimate that impacts of this scale produce about 140 new craters across the Moon each year. But most new ones are made by microscopic projectiles that leave holes too small to identify in orbital images.
With its numerous instruments, the spacecraft can observe changes to the lunar surface that aren’t apparent in the LROC images alone. After the crater was discovered, scientists working with LRO’s thermal instrument, Diviner, made follow-up observations of the site. They found a 4-mile-wide area around the crater that is about 16 degrees Fahrenheit cooler at night than its surroundings.
This animated image set shows an area on the eastern limb of the Moon before and after McGetchin crater formed there sometime between April 11 and May 22, 2024. The post-impact image was constructed using data taken by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) thermal instrument, Diviner, between Nov. 15, 2025, and Feb. 18, 2026, after scientists discovered the crater in visible-light images taken by LRO’s Wide-Angle Camera. Pre-impact temperatures are from the Diviner Global High-Resolution Mosaics (GHRM). The crater formed on the Moon after a comet or asteroid, possibly the size of a six-story building, hit the surface in a rare, once-in-a-century collision. The dark blue strip that flashes into view reveals a 4-mile-wide “cold spot” around the crater that is about 16 degrees Fahrenheit cooler at night than its surroundings. This cooling happens because an impact fluffs up regolith around a crater, making it less dense and therefore less able to retain heat. Scientists on the Diviner team reported this finding in a paper published on Sept. 16, 2026, in Science Advances. The red and yellow spots indicate areas typically associated with rocks excavated by long-ago impacts which, though still at cryogenic temperatures like their surroundings, remain slightly warmer at night.
NASA Goddard/UCLA/JHU APL
Reporting in a second paper Wednesday in the same journal, researchers say that the cooling happens because the impact fluffs up the regolith around the crater, making it less dense and therefore less able to retain heat.
The large extent of this “cold spot” is striking, scientists say, because it shows that impacts can modify the Moon’s surface far beyond the crater itself. These physical changes could affect how rover wheels interact with the surface, for instance.
A global view of the Moon made by stitching together hundreds of images from the Wide-Angle Camera aboard NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). Robert Wagner, image processing specialist for LRO, made this map using two sets of mages taken several years apart. He used a software designed to highlight any changes between the two sets. Anything that stayed the same turned gray; anything different showed up as bright or dark patches. A black arrow just left of center points to McGetchin crater.
NASA Goddard/Intuitive Machines/Robert Wagner
Road to discovery
The LROC system collects images from about 60 miles above the Moon as LRO loops from pole to pole. The system includes two cameras that capture high‑resolution black‑and‑white images and one camera for moderate‑resolution multispectral images. Over the years and thousands of passes, scientists have built maps detailed enough to spot not only new craters, but also landslides, landers, seismic faults, and even hints of lava tubes.
LROC scientists regularly analyze close-up images of small portions of the Moon’s surface taken by the Narrow-Angle Camera. Using these images, they look for changes that are typically less than 30 feet across. But every few years the team searches for large (wider than 150 feet) features by creating global Moon maps and comparing them to older versions.
An overhead, close-up view of McGetchin crater that was taken on Dec. 5, 2025, by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) Narrow-Angle Camera (NAC). After the crater was discovered on Oct. 24, 2025, in global images from LRO’s Wide-Angle Camera, which captures broad views with pixels the size of American football fields, scientists turned to the NAC, which takes much sharper views at about 3 feet per pixel. The NAC images, taken as LRO flew over the impact site again, revealed the crater size, shape, and how the surrounding terrain was affected by the impact that carved McGetchin. The image covers an area that’s ¾ mile wide.
NASA Goddard/Intuitive Machines
This view from the side (55° away from straight down) towards the east, covers an area of the Moon that’s about 1.5 miles wide. It was taken by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Narrow-Angle Camera on March 3, 2026.
NASA Goddard/Intuitive Machines
That’s what Wagner was doing on Oct. 24, 2025, when he came across McGetchin. Using images from LROC’s Wide-Angle Camera, which captures broad views with pixels the size of football fields, he stacked hundreds of “before” and “after” frames with software designed to highlight change. Anything that stayed the same turned gray while anything different showed up as bright or dark patches.
While the process sounds straightforward, spotting real craters requires a lot of manual work. The software flags every tiny shift in lighting or shadow, generating hundreds of false alarms. For this reason, Wagner typically verifies the software, looking for small fuzzy halos around pixel‑wide bright points, which indicate splashes of regolith around a new crater.
Spanning hundreds of pixels, McGetchin stood out immediately. “It was by far the most obvious impact debris pattern I’ve ever seen in one of these images,” Wagner said.
After his discovery, scientists turned to the Narrow-Angle Camera, which takes much sharper views at about 3 feet per pixel. This camera’s close-up images, taken as LRO flew over the impact site again, revealed the crater size, shape, and how the surrounding terrain was affected. These images also helped researchers estimate the size and force of the rock fragment that formed the new crater, details that are expected to appear in a future paper.
Banner image caption: A zoomed-in view of the Moon, with debris around McGetchin crater visible as a white spot circled by a dark halo just right of center of the image (marked with black arrows). This is the view that Robert Wagner saw on Oct. 24, 2025, during a routine data-quality check. Wagner is an image processing specialist for NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, a system of three cameras. Using images from the Wide-Angle Camera (WAC), which captures broad views with pixels the size of American football fields, he stacked hundreds of images captured by WAC over the last several years with software designed to highlight change. Anything that stayed the same is gray; anything that changed showed up as bright or dark patches. The stripes in the image are due to slight changes in lighting between the older and newer images. This image composite shows an area of the Moon approximately 900 miles across.
About the Author
Lonnie Shekhtman
Senior Science Writer
Shekhtman helps communicate NASA planetary science to the world through news and feature stories on NASA.gov, videos for NASA+ and YouTube, and by working with the media. She reports on lunar and Mars science and exploration; NASA's search for life; missions to Venus, Titan, and Jupiter's Trojan asteroids; and many other topics related to NASA's exploration of our solar system and beyond.
Scientists discovered a crater on the Moon that formed sometime between April 11 and May 22, 2024, after a comet or asteroid the size of a three- to six-story building hit the surface.
The crash left a crater, 728 feet wide, that spans the length of two football fields. And at 141 feet deep, the crater could fit three vertically stacked yellow school buses.
A zoomed-in view of the Moon made from images from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera. (More information at the bottom of article.)
Credits: NASA Goddard/Intuitive Machines/Robert Wagner
It started as a routine data-quality check. But as Robert Wagner, a scientist with NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), scanned a giant Moon map on his computer screen, an unusually large bright spot circled by a dark halo caught his eye, as it implied that surface material in that area had been shaken up.
“I just stopped, dropped everything, and started looking into what that spot was,” said Wagner, an image-processing specialist from Intuitive Machines who works with data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) system.
By comparing before and after images of the Moon, Wagner realized he had discovered the largest, newly formed crater ever found in the solar system, as scientists reported Wednesday in Science Advances. This discovery highlights the value of NASA’s Moon orbiter data in studying a dynamic landscape as the agency advances a sustained human presence and expanded scientific and commercial activity on the Moon.
A zoomed-in view of McGetchin crater, circled on the left, next to a “before” image on the right. The panel on the left is made from images captured by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Wide-Angle Camera in summer 2025; the right panel was made from images taken in spring 2011. The white spot is not the crater itself, but rather material flung out of the crater, which formed when a rock, possibly this size of a three- to six‑story building, crashed into the Moon between April 11 and May 22, 2024 – a once-in-a-century event, as scientists reported on Sept. 15, 2026, in a pair of papers in Science Advances. The area shown in the images is 38 miles wide.
NASA Goddard/Intuitive Machines/Robert Wagner
Officially named McGetchin after pioneering lunar scientist Tom McGetchin, the crater formed on the Moon’s eastern edge sometime between April 11 and May 22, 2024, after a comet or asteroid the size of a three- to six-story building hit the surface.
The crash left a crater, 728 feet wide, that spans the length of two football fields. And at 141 feet deep, the crater could fit three vertically stacked yellow school buses.
Scientists estimate that an impact of this magnitude happens on the Moon about once in a century or even longer.
Moon takes some hits
For more than 17 years, LRO has been circling the Moon and using its seven instruments to map the topography, surface composition, temperature, and radiation environment there. The spacecraft’s team has identified at least 1,000 new impact craters throughout the mission and flagged 100,000 more surface changes from an object smashing into the Moon or from the debris that flung out after.
With no atmosphere to slow them or burn them up, space rocks and other objects easily reach the lunar surface. Most are much smaller compared to the object that carved out McGetchin crater. The smallest craters scientists can distinguish from LRO images are about 30 feet wide, the length of a three-story building laid on its side, made by rocks about 43 inches wide, the size of a monster-truck tire. Scientists estimate that impacts of this scale produce about 140 new craters across the Moon each year. But most new ones are made by microscopic projectiles that leave holes too small to identify in orbital images.
With its numerous instruments, the spacecraft can observe changes to the lunar surface that aren’t apparent in the LROC images alone. After the crater was discovered, scientists working with LRO’s thermal instrument, Diviner, made follow-up observations of the site. They found a 4-mile-wide area around the crater that is about 16 degrees Fahrenheit cooler at night than its surroundings.
This animated image set shows an area on the eastern limb of the Moon before and after McGetchin crater formed there sometime between April 11 and May 22, 2024. The post-impact image was constructed using data taken by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) thermal instrument, Diviner, between Nov. 15, 2025, and Feb. 18, 2026, after scientists discovered the crater in visible-light images taken by LRO’s Wide-Angle Camera. Pre-impact temperatures are from the Diviner Global High-Resolution Mosaics (GHRM). The crater formed on the Moon after a comet or asteroid, possibly the size of a six-story building, hit the surface in a rare, once-in-a-century collision. The dark blue strip that flashes into view reveals a 4-mile-wide “cold spot” around the crater that is about 16 degrees Fahrenheit cooler at night than its surroundings. This cooling happens because an impact fluffs up regolith around a crater, making it less dense and therefore less able to retain heat. Scientists on the Diviner team reported this finding in a paper published on Sept. 16, 2026, in Science Advances. The red and yellow spots indicate areas typically associated with rocks excavated by long-ago impacts which, though still at cryogenic temperatures like their surroundings, remain slightly warmer at night.
NASA Goddard/UCLA/JHU APL
Reporting in a second paper Wednesday in the same journal, researchers say that the cooling happens because the impact fluffs up the regolith around the crater, making it less dense and therefore less able to retain heat.
The large extent of this “cold spot” is striking, scientists say, because it shows that impacts can modify the Moon’s surface far beyond the crater itself. These physical changes could affect how rover wheels interact with the surface, for instance.
A global view of the Moon made by stitching together hundreds of images from the Wide-Angle Camera aboard NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). Robert Wagner, image processing specialist for LRO, made this map using two sets of mages taken several years apart. He used a software designed to highlight any changes between the two sets. Anything that stayed the same turned gray; anything different showed up as bright or dark patches. A black arrow just left of center points to McGetchin crater.
NASA Goddard/Intuitive Machines/Robert Wagner
Road to discovery
The LROC system collects images from about 60 miles above the Moon as LRO loops from pole to pole. The system includes two cameras that capture high‑resolution black‑and‑white images and one camera for moderate‑resolution multispectral images. Over the years and thousands of passes, scientists have built maps detailed enough to spot not only new craters, but also landslides, landers, seismic faults, and even hints of lava tubes.
LROC scientists regularly analyze close-up images of small portions of the Moon’s surface taken by the Narrow-Angle Camera. Using these images, they look for changes that are typically less than 30 feet across. But every few years the team searches for large (wider than 150 feet) features by creating global Moon maps and comparing them to older versions.
An overhead, close-up view of McGetchin crater that was taken on Dec. 5, 2025, by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) Narrow-Angle Camera (NAC). After the crater was discovered on Oct. 24, 2025, in global images from LRO’s Wide-Angle Camera, which captures broad views with pixels the size of American football fields, scientists turned to the NAC, which takes much sharper views at about 3 feet per pixel. The NAC images, taken as LRO flew over the impact site again, revealed the crater size, shape, and how the surrounding terrain was affected by the impact that carved McGetchin. The image covers an area that’s ¾ mile wide.
NASA Goddard/Intuitive Machines
This view from the side (55° away from straight down) towards the east, covers an area of the Moon that’s about 1.5 miles wide. It was taken by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Narrow-Angle Camera on March 3, 2026.
NASA Goddard/Intuitive Machines
That’s what Wagner was doing on Oct. 24, 2025, when he came across McGetchin. Using images from LROC’s Wide-Angle Camera, which captures broad views with pixels the size of football fields, he stacked hundreds of “before” and “after” frames with software designed to highlight change. Anything that stayed the same turned gray while anything different showed up as bright or dark patches.
While the process sounds straightforward, spotting real craters requires a lot of manual work. The software flags every tiny shift in lighting or shadow, generating hundreds of false alarms. For this reason, Wagner typically verifies the software, looking for small fuzzy halos around pixel‑wide bright points, which indicate splashes of regolith around a new crater.
Spanning hundreds of pixels, McGetchin stood out immediately. “It was by far the most obvious impact debris pattern I’ve ever seen in one of these images,” Wagner said.
After his discovery, scientists turned to the Narrow-Angle Camera, which takes much sharper views at about 3 feet per pixel. This camera’s close-up images, taken as LRO flew over the impact site again, revealed the crater size, shape, and how the surrounding terrain was affected. These images also helped researchers estimate the size and force of the rock fragment that formed the new crater, details that are expected to appear in a future paper.
Banner image caption: A zoomed-in view of the Moon, with debris around McGetchin crater visible as a white spot circled by a dark halo just right of center of the image (marked with black arrows). This is the view that Robert Wagner saw on Oct. 24, 2025, during a routine data-quality check. Wagner is an image processing specialist for NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, a system of three cameras. Using images from the Wide-Angle Camera (WAC), which captures broad views with pixels the size of American football fields, he stacked hundreds of images captured by WAC over the last several years with software designed to highlight change. Anything that stayed the same is gray; anything that changed showed up as bright or dark patches. The stripes in the image are due to slight changes in lighting between the older and newer images. This image composite shows an area of the Moon approximately 900 miles across.
About the Author
Lonnie Shekhtman
Senior Science Writer
Shekhtman helps communicate NASA planetary science to the world through news and feature stories on NASA.gov, videos for NASA+ and YouTube, and by working with the media. She reports on lunar and Mars science and exploration; NASA’s search for life; missions to Venus, Titan, and Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids; and many other topics related to NASA’s exploration of our solar system and beyond.
Scientists discovered a crater on the Moon that formed sometime between April 11 and May 22, 2024, after a comet or asteroid the size of a three- to six-story building hit the surface.
The crash left a crater, 728 feet wide, that spans the length of two football fields. And at 141 feet deep, the crater could fit three vertically stacked yellow school buses.
upgraded to Golden gate. getting this message to login to facetime with an email i’ve not used in years. it’s not the emai for my current apple account.
the window keeps appearing and wont go away. any ideas how to fix this? thanks.
Well, it's different in a number of ways, I've hardly scratched the surface especially in regard to display options, mostly because my display was fine before and it still is.
What I can say is it seems "snappier" on my M1 14" MBP. I'm sure windows and desktops are opening and closing quicker than before.
My menu bar has changed, I have had to turn off Bartender 6 which used to show hidden menu bar items when "clicked" it no longer works as it did and seems to conflict with something new...
The symptoms: The man went to an emergency department after fainting. He had felt nauseous just before the episode, which lasted about three minutes and was followed by a second fainting episode lasting about two minutes. He also had swelling around one eye.
His family told doctors that he hadn't shown any jerking movements, loss of bladder control or subsequent grogginess, which would have been telltale signs of a seizure.
What happened next: Because the man had fainted twice and had a history of heart disease, doctors first looked for problems affecting his brain and heart. An MRI of his brain, used to look for structural abnormalities that could explain the fainting, and an electroencephalogram (EEG), which records the brain's electrical activity, did not reveal a cause.
The man had persistently low blood pressure, the doctors observed, and this led them to move him to the intensive care unit. There, doctors carried out tests for infections and heart attack, but all came back negative.
Meanwhile, the swelling around one of his eyes spread to both eyes and then across his face, while his blood pressure continued to fall despite treatment with intravenous fluids.
The doctors probed further into the man's medical history and activities before the fainting episodes. They learned that he had applied an artificial hair dye two days before he became ill. Soon afterward, he developed itching on his scalp, neck and face. He self-treated with the allergy medicine cetirizine, an antihistamine, for two days. He also reported spending two to three hours outdoors in the sun each day after he'd applied the hair dye.
The diagnosis: Based on the man's recent use of hair dye, the itching that followed, his rapidly worsening facial swelling and his persistently low blood pressure, doctors concluded that he was experiencing anaphylaxis, a severe allergic reaction that can affect the whole body. The reaction can be life-threatening if left untreated.
Anaphylaxis is a medical emergency and can be life-threatening. (Image credit: SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY via Getty Images)
The treatment: Doctors treated the man with epinephrine (also called adrenaline), a hormonal medication that rapidly reverses the effects of anaphylaxis. They also gave him antihistamines and steroids to help bring the allergic reaction under control, along with intravenous fluids to raise his blood pressure.
However, the patient's blood pressure remained dangerously low, so doctors continued giving him epinephrine through an intravenous drip for about 16 hours. Over the next three days of treatment, his blood pressure stabilized and the swelling in his face gradually subsided.
He was transferred to a general ward and treated there for another five days before being discharged. He was advised that he could have a similar reaction in the future and referred to a dermatologist.
What makes the case unique: Most allergic reactions to hair dye remain limited to the skin, causing itching, redness and swelling where the dye has touched it. Severe reactions affecting the whole body are uncommon, the man's doctors wrote in a report of the case.
The itching the man noticed shortly after applying the dye was likely an early, mild allergic reaction, his doctors wrote. That reaction later progressed to a much more severe one, they suggested, raising the possibility of a "biphasic" allergic reaction, an uncommon pattern seen in about 5% of patients with anaphylaxis. However, this remains only a possible explanation.
The doctors also noted that the man's prolonged sun exposure after he applied the dye may have intensified the reaction; they cited previous research that ultraviolet light can enhance the allergy-triggering effects of para-phenylenediamine, a common ingredient in hair dyes. In the report, the doctors did not identify the exact hair dye ingredient that triggered the reaction in this instance.
The case highlights the importance of asking about recent use of products such as hair dye when doctors evaluate patients with otherwise unexplained fainting, facial swelling or shock, the medical team concluded.
It's been awhile since I posted here - such an incredibly helpful and knowledgeable group!
Some background on today's issue:
I have two laptops, one at work and one at home. I keep them synced so I can work from anywhere. Mac OSTahoe running 26.6.2 on both.
Here's my current delimma. On my work laptop when I plug in my iPhone 16 Prom Max (software up to date) the Iphone appears in the finder and I can do what I need to do.
Dr. Stephen Kane from the University of California, Riverside and colleagues offer a tidy explanation for one of the Solar System’s enduring puzzles: why Venus, so similar to Earth in size and mass, has no moon at all.
Chama-se Geração STEM .PT e é um novo programa lançado pelo .PT concebido para apoiar e reconhecer raparigas e mulheres que querem construir o seu percurso académico nas áreas da Ciência, Tecnologia, Engenharia e Matemática (STEM).
In April, the world watched as four humans circled the Moon for the first time in over 50 years with NASA’s Artemis II mission. On Saturday, Sept. 19, the public is invited to look up again with NASA events across the country, including the International Observe the Moon Night celebration held at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Visitor Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
This year, NASA will celebrate International Observe the Moon Night with people around the world on Sept. 19.
NASA/Vi Nguyen
International Observe the Moon Night is an annual celebration that brings people together to learn about the Moon and explore our connection to Earth’s nearest celestial neighbor. Since the program began in 2010, people around the world have participated through lunar observations, hands-on activities, artwork, music, and more.
At NASA Goddard, this year’s celebration will highlight the agency’s ongoing exploration of the Moon, including the historic Artemis II mission. Visitors can peer behind the scenes to learn more about what it took to make Artemis II’s journey around the Moon a success and discover how Goddard scientists and engineers are helping advance our understanding of the Moon, solar system, and beyond.
The event will run from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. EDT.
Throughout the event at NASA Goddard, visitors can take part in interactive hands-on activities, create artwork and crafts, and capture selfies at a photo kiosk. Telescopes will also be set up outside (depending on weather), giving attendees an opportunity to observe the Moon and other astronomical objects up close. Inside the Visitor Center, guests can even see a real Apollo 14 Moon rock on display.
At 6:30 p.m., Dr. Amanda Nahm, planetary scientist at NASA Headquarters, will explore the lunar science and Moon joy from Artemis II.
At 7:30 p.m., Ernie Wright, scientific visualizer at NASA Goddard, will offer a more technical look at how scientists use real data to create videos and visualizations of the Moon.
A family observes the Moon through a telescope at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. during the International Observe the Moon Night celebration on Saturday, Sept. 14, 2024.
NASA/Britt Griswold
The event will also offer a chance to learn more about the groundbreaking research happening at NASA Goddard as scientists work to unlock the secrets of the Moon with missions like the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and explore our solar system and the universe beyond.
International Observe the Moon Night at Goddard is free and family friendly. Registration is not required, although registering in advance will help the Visitor Center team plan for the event. The event will take place rain or shine, and free parking is available at the Visitor Center.
For people who cannot travel to Greenbelt, there are opportunities to participate in International Observe the Moon Night from all around the planet. Join lunar observers around the world by observing the Moon with friends and family, attending a virtual event or finding an event in your area. Learn more and register your participation at go.nasa.gov/ObserveTheMoon.
International Observe the Moon Night is sponsored by NASA’s LRO mission and the Solar System Exploration Division of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, with support from many partners. The celebration is a way for people to pause and look up at our future destination, as NASA prepares for deep space missions to the Moon and beyond.
Astronauts could travel back to Earth from Mars using rocket fuel converted directly from the carbon dioxide in the Red Planet's atmosphere, using a technique known as electrochemical reduction, a recent study reports.
It's an old method involving electrolysis, which is the application of an electrical current to drive a chemical reaction, but the new trick produces methane pure enough to be used as liquid propellant. (A number of rocket engines these days burn liquid oxygen and liquid methane — including the Raptors that power Starship, the rocket SpaceX is developing to help humanity get to Mars.)
"The work we're doing is basically taking CO2 and using electricity to convert it into carbon-containing fuels and chemicals," said Carter Racine in a statement. Racine is a Ph.D. student in mechanical engineering at Texas A&M University and a member of the study team, which was led by University of Mississippi chemical engineer Ahmed Badreldin.
"You can't bring up everything you need [on Mars] from Earth, because every additional kilogram adds enormous cost and complexity to launch and escape Earth's gravity," added Badreldin. "So the question becomes, How do we make the fuels and chemicals needed for space exploration from the resources already available at the destination?"
One answer is electrochemical reduction, which takes place in an electrolyzer, with electrons flowing from the negatively charged anode to the positively charged cathode. Water at the anode is oxidized, meaning it loses an electron, which is transferred to the carbon dioxide at the cathode, where one of its atoms gains an electron and becomes what chemists refer to as "reduced" (meaning its oxidation state is lowered). It can then react with the hydrogen and oxygen atoms that have split from the oxidized water molecules.
The anode contains a catalyst, and the choice of material for the catalyst dictates what carbon-based compounds are produced when the reduced carbon reacts with the hydrogen and oxygen. For example, a gold catalyst leads to the production of carbon monoxide (CO), while copper produces more complex compounds including alcohols, ethanol and methane (CH4).
What makes the work of Badreldin's team stand apart from previous experiments is that they have developed a nanometer-scale copper catalyst doped in nitrogen that is able to produce nearly pure methane.
Electrochemical reduction of carbon dioxide has been used to produce methane before, in applications on Earth. The problem is, those methods have produced a lot of byproducts alongside methane. On Earth we have complex equipment that separates the methane from the other unwanted compounds, but astronauts are not going to be able to take such unwieldy devices to Mars when every kilogram counts. That's a problem, because for methane to be used as a liquid propellant in rocket fuel it needs to be pure.
NASA wants to send astronauts to Mars in the late 2030s or early 2040s. (Image credit: NASA)
However, the specific copper catalyst used by Badreldin's team is able to preferentially produce methane over other compounds, thereby creating it pure without having to refine it. And there's plenty of carbon dioxide available on Mars to use: While Mars' atmosphere is thin, it is nonetheless composed of 96% carbon dioxide.
Even if astronauts never go to Mars, the usefulness of this technique on Earth is clear. Rather than drilling for this natural gas, we can create methane from the carbon dioxide already in our atmosphere.
"We want to do that because right now many of these carbon-based products ultimately come from virgin fossil resources," said Racine. "If we can make them using captured CO2 and renewable electricity, it could reduce reliance on virgin fossil carbon and help close the carbon cycle."
Consequently, electrochemical reduction has also been suggested for use on Earth as a carbon sequestration technique, drawing carbon dioxide out of our atmosphere where it acts as an unwanted greenhouse gas.
The problem with that is, converting carbon dioxide into methane to be burned as a fuel simply releases that carbon dioxide straight back into the atmosphere in a net-zero cycle. Ideally, we want to lock that carbon dioxide away from the atmosphere for a long period of time, but Badreldin doesn't think the technology is ready yet.
"What we are ultimately interested in is seeing whether we can move beyond simply recycling CO2 and toward pathways that are net-negative," he said. "That means using CO2 as a carbon source while converting it into products where the carbon is stored or used long enough that it is not immediately released back into the atmosphere."
It should be noted that the best way to alleviate climate change is to cease burning all fossil fuels, including methane. However, using methane created from electrochemical carbon dioxide reduction in a net-zero process rather than drilling for it could help during the transition from fossil fuels to renewable resources.
The study reporting this research was published in April in the journal ACS Catalysis.
A broad pit that looks almost like a "footprint" on Mars is unlike anything researchers have ever seen on the Red Planet. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)
Is that a footprint on Mars? Sorry to burst your bubble, but no. However, scientists have found a strange feature unlike anything they've seen before on the Red Planet's surface.
What is it?
While NASA's Perseverance rover is the newest addition to the agency's robotic Red Planet fleet, its cousin Curiosity is still going strong and finding strange and unusual things on Mars 14 years after landing.
In new observations captured on Mars' Mount Sharp, the Curiosity team has identified "features unlike quite anything we have seen in the past," Michelle Minitti, deputy principal investigator for Curiosity's Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI), said in a statement.
These mysterious features are a bunch of broad, shallow pits scattered across the Martian bedrock.
Why is it incredible?
While little pits and divots are common to find on the Martian surface, these wide, shallow pits that researchers saw with Curiosity are quite different from surface features that have been seen before.
"The pits of this week were much broader and shallower than past features and were not accompanied by obvious objects that were once in the pits," Minitti said.
The team collected as much data as they could on the strange pits using Curiosity's various instruments, including MAHLI, the Mastcam camera, ChemCam (the Chemistry and Camera complex) and APX (Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer).
They have so far found interesting layers in the pit material that seems chemically different from the main bedrock.
But we will have to wait and see what else researchers might be able to learn about these odd pits. How did they form? How long have they existed? What can they tell us about the history of Mars?
The Moon may have emerged largely intact within hours of the colossal impact that shaped its birth. Earth has an unusually large moon for a planet of its size and position in the solar system, yet scientists still do not fully understand how that companion came to exist. Now, researchers from the Southwest Research Institute [...]
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