Students in Cornell’s Space Systems Design Studio (SSDS) have released mission results for two unique light-sail experiments. These sails are slightly larger than a pizza box and harness momentum from photons to accelerate to high velocities. With ChipSats onboard—gram-scale spacecraft that fit in the palm of your hand—the sails can become free-flyers. They origami-fold into CubeSats for launch and completely separate when deployed, allowing them to be far smaller and lighter than traditional solar sails. The ChipSats provide all ground communications and steering capabilities for a fraction of the mass and cost.

When NASA’s Perseverance rover reached the inner edge of Mars’ Jezero Crater in September 2023, mission scientists were surprised by what they found. The geologic area, called the “Margin Unit,” stretches along the shoreline of an ancient Martian lake, so they expected sedimentary rocks, which would have formed as layers of sand piled on top of each other over millennia. Composed of clay and silt, sedimentary rocks on Earth are good at preserving past microbial life. The scientists were especially intrigued by strong signals of carbonate minerals detected by Mars orbiters. On Earth, carbonates frequently form in shallow ocean and lake environments capable of supporting life.

The sun’s magnetic fields are a twisty, curvy, ever-changing mess. In particular, our star’s polar regions host areas called polar coronal holes, which contain invisible magnetic highways that stretch into interplanetary space. But there’s a lot we don’t know about how those highways actually work, particularly how they give the particles that form the fast solar wind an extra “kick” that sends them zooming at hundreds of kilometers per second.

Using data from the Japan–led XRISM (X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission) observatory, astronomers have directly observed a giant star’s outflow, called a stellar wind, being captured by its compact companion and providing the power source for strong X-ray flares. The research is part of NASA’s exploration of the extreme universe to better understand how the cosmos works.

A star and its planets form when a cloud of gas and dust collapses in on itself somewhere in space. The cloud then forms a disk around the nascent star, within which the planets will form. This protostar and its disk then rotate in the same direction.