The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has approved the launch of Reflect Orbital's Earendil 1 satellite — a space mirror 18 meters wide designed to reflect sunlight to the ground.
The post Observers Beware: Reflect Orbital’s Space Mirrors Approved for Launch appeared first on Sky & Telescope.
Many observations of solar flares suffer from saturation and blooming, causing crucial information to be lost. Researchers recently validated a technique for retrieving information from saturated flare images, unlocking a treasure trove of powerful solar flares for examination.
Since 2010, the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) on the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) has been capturing nearly continuous extreme-ultraviolet images of the Sun’s disk, revealing our star’s dramatic high-energy behavior. Though SDO/AIA’s observations have transformed our understanding of the Sun’s activity, they have limitations: powerful solar flares can saturate the detector, spilling charge into nearby pixels.
This saturation and overflow compromises our ability to study the most energetic solar flares — but the “lost” information may actually be recoverable. When light from an intense flare enters SDO’s instruments, not all of it pools in the saturated region of the detector: some of the light is diffracted by the optics, and by mathematically inverting this pattern of diffracted light, researchers can attempt to extract the encoded information about the saturated region. Researchers have used this technique for more than a decade, but options for validating the results were limited until now.
Launched almost 10 years to the day after SDO, the Solar Orbiter spacecraft provides an excellent opportunity to test inversion techniques for recovering information from saturated solar images. Solar Orbiter’s Extreme Ultraviolet Imager snaps brief photos of the Sun at a rapid cadence, and its images remain unsaturated even when faced with energetic solar flares.
Positions of SDO (green) and Solar Orbiter (blue) during a solar flare on 19 March 2024. Click to enlarge. [Guastavino et al. 2026]
Guastavino’s team aligned and reprojected the data, accounting for the slightly different viewing angles of the two spacecraft, then applied an algorithm called Adaptive SE-DESAT to reconstruct the flux within the saturated portion of the SDO image. The team compared the desaturated SDO images to the unsaturated Solar Orbiter images over the course of the flare, finding the same flare morphology and similar time evolution between the two data sets.
Example of unprocessed SDO data (top left), desaturated SDO data (top right), Solar Orbiter data (bottom left), and a combination of the two data sources (bottom right). Note that the Solar Orbiter observations have been clipped so that only the highest flare intensities were recorded. Click to enlarge. [Adapted from Guastavino et al. 2026]
Overall, these results demonstrate the effectiveness of the inversion technique, though Guastavino and coauthors noted that improvements could be made during the impulsive phase of the flare, when the emission is increasing. The team identified several reasons why the results may not match during this phase, including rapid evolution of the flare during individual exposures.
Despite these areas that require further attention, the validation of this technique unlocks 16 years of solar flare observations from SDO. This especially enhances our sample of powerful solar flares, increasing the available records of the most energetic solar flares by orders of magnitude.
“Validation of an Extreme-Ultraviolet Desaturation Technique for the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly on Board the Solar Dynamics Observatory Using Observations from the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager on Board Solar Orbiter,” Sabrina Guastavino et al 2026 ApJL 1005 L50. doi:10.3847/2041-8213/ae7d2e
The post When the Spacecraft Align: Rescuing Saturated Images of Solar Flares appeared first on AAS Nova.
NASA is once again sending scientific missions to the Moon. But under the new commercial framework for getting there, researchers need to invent a new method for how to pick where to land.
NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program is a bold innovation in organizing robotic missions to the Moon. Under this model, rather than keeping the mission process entirely in-house, the agency selects the scientific mission they want to support then simply buys a ride to the lunar surface from a commercial vendor. But, how do you pick a landing site before you know exactly how you’re getting there?
The Gruithuisen domes region, the broad area the Lunar-VISE team searched for potential landing sites. Click to enlarge. [Adapted from Williams et al. 2026]
Picking a landing site is no small task: for context, selecting the landing sites for each of the most recent Mars rovers took five years and multiple community workshops. The Lunar-VISE team therefore took a streamlined and logic-driven approach. They started by explicitly laying out their science objectives: Lunar-VISE’s purpose is to investigate some strangely silicate-rich volcanic formations called the Gruithuisen domes, so they had to land either on or near those. They also had to have access to boulders that were excavated from deep within the domes during a crater formation event, so they had to pick a spot with boulders relatively nearby.
In addition to objectives, they also laid out a slew of constraints. Although they needed boulders nearby, they couldn’t have too many boulders, or any particularly large boulders, since those could pose hazards for landing. There also couldn’t be any steep slopes in the field. Most of the area had to maintain a line of sight with a supporting orbiter for communications, so they couldn’t set down near any ridges. Also, they had to consider how the terrain would cast shadows as the lunar day progressed, since they didn’t want their mission cut short by freezing temperatures and a lack of solar power. As the team quipped, “many interesting, high-science value locations on the Moon may not be in proverbial ‘parking lots.'”
An image from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter overlaid onto a terrain model of the final landing site. Click to enlarge. [Williams et al. 2026]
In addition to presenting their landing site, the researchers offered a handful of lessons to others who may someday be in the fortunate and thrilling position of needing to pick a landing spot on the Moon. For one, they urged teams to coordinate with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter specialists as early as possible, since processing the imaging data for lander-quality maps is a specialized and intensive task. For another, they recommended that all of the software tools used be made publicly available so that future missions don’t need to duplicate their work.
As this article laid out, the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program and Lunar-VISE take us one step closer to making missions to the Moon routine — but we’re still figuring out exactly how to do that.
“Lunar-VISE Landing Site Selection and Characterization at Mons Gruithuisen Gamma,” Jean-Pierre Williams et al 2026 Planet. Sci. J. 7 161. doi:10.3847/PSJ/ae7d2c
The post Putting the Landing Site Before the Lander appeared first on AAS Nova.
Login