A state-of-the-art asteroid alert system operated by the University of Hawaiʻi Institute for Astronomy (IfA) can now scan the entire dark sky every 24 hours for dangerous bodies that could plummet toward Earth.

The NASA-funded Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) has expanded its reach to the southern hemisphere, from two existing northern-hemisphere telescopes on Haleakalā and Maunaloa. Construction is now complete and operations are underway on two additional telescopes in South Africa and Chile.

"An asteroid that hits the Earth can come at any time from any direction, so ATLAS is now all the sky, all the time," said John Tonry, IfA professor and ATLAS principal investigator.

The new telescopes are located at Sutherland Observing Station in South Africa and El Sauce Observatory in Chile. These locations were selected not only for their access to the southern part of the sky but also their time difference from Hawaiʻi—they are able to observe at night when it is daytime in Hawaiʻi.

It's not often that the sudden appearance of a new impact crater on the moon can be predicted, but it's going to happen on March 4, when a derelict SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will crash into it.

The rocket launched in 2015, carrying NASA's Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) probe into a position 1.5 million kilometers from the Earth, facing the Sun. But the expended upper stage of the rocket had insufficient speed to escape into an independent orbit around the Sun, and was abandoned without an option to steer back into the Earth's atmosphere. That would be normal practice, allowing stages to burn up on re-entry, thus reducing the clutter in near-Earth space caused by dangerous junk.

Space travel is all about momentum.

Rockets turn their fuel into momentum that carries people, satellites and science itself forward into space. 2021 was a year full of records for space programs around the world, and that momentum is carrying forward into 2022.

Last year, the commercial space race truly took off. Richard Branson and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos both rode on suborbital launches—and brought friends, including actor William Shatner. SpaceX sent eight astronauts and 1 ton of supplies to the International Space Station for NASA.

This feature could easily be mistaken for a tree stump with characteristic concentric rings. It's actually an impressive birds-eye view into an ice-rich impact crater on Mars. Tree rings provide snapshots of Earth's past climate and, although formed in a very different way, the patterns inside this crater reveal details of the Red Planet's history, too.

The image was taken by the CaSSIS camera onboard the ESA/Roscosmos ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) on 13 June 2021 in the vast northern plains of Acidalia Planitia, centered at 51.9°N/326.7°E.

The interior of the crater is filled with deposits that are probably water-ice rich. It is thought that these deposits were laid down during an earlier time in Mars' history when the inclination of the planet's spin axis allowed water-ice deposits to form at lower latitudes than it does today. Just like on Earth, Mars' tilt gives rises to seasons, but unlike Earth its tilt has changed dramatically over long periods of time.

One of the notable features in the crater deposits is the presence of quasi-circular and polygonal patterns of fractures.