Space News: SpaceX's Starship engine failure could cause problem for NASA's 2028 moon mission objectives

SpaceX's Starship engine failure could cause problem for NASA's 2028 moon mission objectives

A longer delay would pose not only a greater setback to SpaceX's commercial ambitions to rapidly expand its Starlink broadband satellite network, but its pivotal role in NASA's Artemis moon program.

By Reuters, September 29, 2026

https://www.jpost.com/science/space/article-910077

The SpaceX Starship and Super Heavy v3 Booster lift off on its 13th test flight from the SpaceX launch complex in Starbase, Texas, U.S., July 24, 2026. (photo credit: REUTERS/STEVE NESIUS)

The Starship engine failure that nearly foiled the orbital debut of SpaceX's next-generation spacecraft on its 14th uncrewed test flight may complicate NASA's ability to meet its time frame for astronaut missions to the moon.

Starship, designed in part to carry large payloads to space, is one of two vehicles vying to become the first craft that NASA will use as early as 2028 to land humans on the moon and bring them safely home, a feat last achieved in 1972 at the end of the Apollo era.

While Starship accomplished a number of key objectives in its latest test launch from Texas on Monday, the mission was cut short by several hours after a malfunction of its propulsion system.

Despite the unexpected shutdown of one of its three main Raptor engines following Starship separation from its lower-stage booster rocket, flight controllers proceeded with sending the spacecraft to orbit for its first-ever commercial satellite deployment.

Determining what caused the engine glitch remains critical to SpaceX's bottom line. But the stakes are potentially higher for NASA, as a Starship moon-landing vehicle would rely on the same engine system for transporting astronauts through space to and from the lunar surface.

NASA astronaut and Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman takes a moment during the seven-hour lunar observation period where the crew reported to the ground team their observations including color nuances, which will help enhance scientific understandings of the Moon, April 6, 2026. (credit: NASA/HANDOUT VIA REUTERS)

How big a blow to Starship's development progress the engine snafu becomes depends on whether it turns out to be "a one-off failure of a single part" or points to a larger design problem that requires upgrades "across the fleet," said Dean Sladen, an aerospace engineer for Accu Components.

"Any engine fix that holds up the next flights, including the planned attempt to catch the ship with the launch tower's arms (after re-entry), eats into that schedule," he said.

NASA and SpaceX did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment.

'The real pressure is the moon'

A longer delay would pose not only a greater setback to SpaceX's commercial ambitions to rapidly expand its Starlink broadband satellite network, but its pivotal role in NASA's Artemis moon program.

"The real pressure is the moon. NASA needs Starship for Artemis III," an Earth-orbit test mission targeted as soon as next summer as a rehearsal flight for the program's actual first crewed lunar landing, Sladen said.

Raptor engine and propulsion-system issues have contributed to several previous Starship setbacks, including an engine that failed to ignite as planned during Starship's 12th flight in May. The methane-fueled engines are among the most complex and expensive components on the rocket.

During some previous flights, SpaceX scrubbed plans to test-ignite the Raptor engine in space. But all of the engines successfully fired during ascent on Starship's 13th flight in July.

SpaceX, the newly public venture founded by Elon Musk near Los Angeles in 2002, is competing with Blue Origin, the rival rocket company from fellow entrepreneur Jeff Bezos, to usher in an era of lunar exploration under NASA's Artemis program.

While SpaceX was originally contracted to provide the first crewed lunar lander for Artemis, the head of the US space agency, Jared Isaacman, said in April that NASA would go with whichever lander was ready to fly first. NASA saw the added competition as healthy for progress in light of mounting delays in Starship's test flight program.

NASA hopes to return to the moon's surface by 2028

NASA officially aims to return astronauts to the moon's surface by 2028 - a target widely seen as overly ambitious - to get there ahead of China, which plans a crewed lunar landing by 2030.

A functioning lunar landing craft also will be needed for the precursor Artemis III mission, as early as summer 2027, to test rendezvous and docking manoeuvres in low Earth orbit.

SpaceX is developing a Human Landing System based on its Starship vessel, a towering stainless-steel vehicle far larger than any moon lander built before. Blue Origin is building its own Blue Moon lander, relying on a more traditional design philosophy.

If ready, both landers are likely to participate in the Artemis III mission, demonstrating orbital maneuvers using their in-space engines.

Isaacman went public with the competing lander strategy days after completion of NASA's Artemis II mission sending astronauts around the moon and back in what was the first crewed launch of NASA's Space Launch System rocket, built by Boeing and Northrop Grumman, and the Orion capsule, made by Lockheed Martin.

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The ice blasting from Saturn's moon Enceladus is stranger than scientists realized

www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/09/260929053528.htm

Dramatic plumes spray water ice and vapor from many locations along the famed "tiger stripes" near the south pole of Saturn's moon Enceladus. The tiger stripes are four prominent fractures, each about 84 miles (135 kilometers) long, that cross the moon's south polar terrain. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

Enceladus may be naturally sorting and concentrating chemicals from its hidden ocean, potentially making the search for signs of life much easier.

Date:

September 29, 2026

Source:

Institute of Science Tokyo

Summary:

Enceladus may naturally separate and concentrate chemicals from its hidden ocean as droplets slowly freeze and shatter on their way into space. The process could explain Cassini’s puzzling ice-grain chemistry while giving future spacecraft a powerful advantage in searching for organic compounds and clues to life.

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Saturn's moon Enceladus is covered in ice, but beneath that frozen shell lies a global ocean. Near the moon's south pole, fractures in the crust release water vapor and ice particles into space. Those particles give scientists an unusual way to study an alien ocean without having to drill through kilometers of ice.

An international team that includes researchers from the Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI) at the Institute of Science Tokyo has now investigated what happens to that ocean water as it moves from beneath the surface and eventually becomes the tiny ice grains detected in space.

Cassini Found Surprisingly Diverse Ice Grains

Between 2004 and 2017, the Cosmic Dust Analyzer on NASA's Cassini spacecraft measured the composition of individual ice particles in Saturn's E-ring. That ring is continually supplied with material erupting from Enceladus.

A team led by Prof Frank Postberg at Freie Universität Berlin examined 961 mass spectra from salt-rich grains known as Type 3 particles. If the grains were simply small samples of the same ocean water, scientists might expect them to contain broadly similar mixtures of salts.

Instead, the grains varied dramatically.

Some were especially rich in sodium chloride, while others contained higher amounts of carbonates, phosphates or potassium chloride. One particularly striking pattern was that chloride and carbonate rarely appeared together in the same sodium-rich particle.

That raised a basic puzzle. If all of these grains came from the same ocean, why did their chemical compositions differ so much?

Recreating Enceladus' Ocean Droplets in the Lab

To explore that question, Professor Yasuhito Sekine and colleagues at ELSI created laboratory droplets containing the major salts thought to be present in Enceladus' ocean.

The researchers froze droplets of different sizes under different cooling conditions, then studied how the chemical elements were distributed once the droplets had solidified.

The results showed that the speed of freezing plays a major role.

In droplets about 200 micrometres across, salts became separated into different regions when freezing occurred relatively slowly, at approximately 10 K per minute or less. When the droplets froze more quickly, their chemical ingredients remained much more evenly mixed.

"What surprised us was that the diversity seen by Cassini could emerge from droplets originating from essentially the same ocean water," said Sekine. "Our experiments show that when relatively large ocean droplets freeze slowly, different salts can separate within them. If those frozen droplets are later broken apart, they can produce much smaller ice grains, each with very different chemical compositions."

A Slower Journey Through Enceladus' Ice

The findings may also reveal something about what happens inside the moon's icy crust.

Earlier studies generally assumed that seawater spray from Enceladus freezes quickly and moves rapidly toward space soon after leaving the ocean. The new experiments point to a different scenario.

The droplets may initially move much more slowly through the underground vent system, following complicated pathways through fractures in the ice before they approach the surface.

The researchers suggest that ocean spray first forms droplets ranging from tens to hundreds of micrometers in size. As those droplets move slowly through deeper sections of the vents, they gradually freeze, giving salts enough time to separate into different regions.

Closer to the surface, conditions change. Gas begins moving faster, and the frozen droplets can slam into the walls of narrower icy channels at high speed. Those collisions may break the droplets into much smaller pieces.

Each fragment can come from a different salt-rich region within the original frozen droplet, creating grains with very different chemical compositions. Those fragments can then escape into space and become part of Saturn's E-ring.

"The Cassini data showed us that these salt-rich grains are far more chemically diverse than an average ocean composition would suggest," said Postberg. "Combining those observations with the freezing experiments gives us a physical explanation: Cassini may have sampled fragments of larger frozen ocean droplets, each preserving different components that became separated during their journey towards the surface. The abundance of each individual component in the ocean is then reflected in the number of fragments in which a particular component is found."

Enceladus May Naturally Concentrate Key Compounds

The discovery could be especially important for future missions to Enceladus.

As droplets freeze and break apart, individual compounds can become concentrated in particular grains. The process does not only separate different salts. Earlier work has also shown that organic substances can become separated from one another and appear at elevated concentrations in certain particles.

That could make future analysis considerably easier.

Compounds that are highly diluted in Enceladus' ocean and mixed with many other substances may become much easier to detect when concentrated into individual ice grains.

On Earth, laboratories often spend considerable effort separating and concentrating chemicals before analyzing a sample. Enceladus appears to perform both of these "sample preparation" steps naturally: The chemical components become separated, and some end up concentrated within a fraction of the ice particles.

Possible Implications for Prebiotic Chemistry

Slow freezing could have another important consequence.

As ice crystals grow, small pockets of liquid brine may remain trapped between them. Salts and organic compounds can become highly concentrated inside those pockets.

That concentration could matter for prebiotic chemistry, which involves chemical processes that may precede the emergence of life. One major challenge in such chemistry is bringing molecules that are normally very dilute into close contact with one another.

Because much of the material erupted from Enceladus eventually falls back onto the moon, this freezing, concentration and recycling process could potentially happen again and again.

Understanding how Enceladus forms its ice grains therefore does more than explain Cassini's unusual measurements. It offers new clues about the hidden environment beneath the moon's surface and may help future spacecraft correctly interpret the particles they collect while searching for evidence of habitability and possible signs of life.

Health & Wellness News: Blood test found to detect lung cancer with nearly 93% accuracy for average cost of $60 - study

Blood test found to detect lung cancer with nearly 93% accuracy for average cost of $60 - study

The test involves using a dedicated chip and fluorescence analysis, in which fragments of cell-free DNA in the blood are examined for distinct methylation patterns.

By Danya Saperstein, Jerusalem Post, September 14, 2026

https://www.jpost.com/health-and-wellness/article-908584

                                              A blood test (photo credit: INGIMAGE)

A clinical study found that a new test designed to detect lung cancer had an accuracy rate of nearly 93% in patients, potentially replacing the need for costly and complex genetic sequencing for diagnosis with a $60 blood test. 

The study, led by Dr. Abd Agbaria, head of Oncology at the Bnai Zion Medical Center, in collaboration with researchers at Tel Aviv University, included 103 participants and was published in npj Precision Oncology. 

The test uses a dedicated chip and fluorescence analysis to examine fragments of cell-free DNA in the blood for distinct methylation patterns.

Methylation, a process in which a cluster of hydrogen and carbon atoms is added to DNA, often inhibiting gene expression, can inhibit sections vital for tumor prevention. Identifying methylation patterns enables researchers and healthcare professionals to identify cancerous cells and determine the type of cancer. 

In Agbaria's study, the blood test demonstrated a sensitivity of 93.1% and a specificity of 90.3% among patients with stage 2 to stage 4 cancer. The test also distinguished between adenocarcinoma and squamous cell carcinoma.

                                                            Dr. Abed Agbaria (credit: Micha Brickman)

Agbaria emphasizes advantage of early diagnosis

"Lung cancer is a disease in which the timing of diagnosis is enormously important. The earlier we are able to detect the disease, the greater the possibilities for treatment and cure. Our goal is to develop a tool that is simple, accessible, and readily available, which can help us detect the disease at a stage when meaningful intervention is still possible," Agbaria said. 

Agbaria also warned that before the test can be incorporated into regular use, broader testing will be required. A larger trial is ongoing at several medical centers in Israel and Europe.

The study is the result of a collaboration between researchers from Tel Aviv University, JaxBio Technologies, Bnai Zion Medical Center, and Sheba Medical Center. 

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Defense News: Rafael Integrates SPICE 1000 Precision Weapon With F-35

Rafael Integrates SPICE 1000 Precision Weapon With F-35

The Israeli-made glide bomb is being integrated with the stealth fighter in cooperation with Lockheed Martin, potentially paving the way for other F-35 operators to acquire the weapon

By Ami Rojkes Dombe, Israeldefense.co.il, 16/09/2026

https://www.israeldefense.co.il/en/node/70844

Rafael Advanced Defense Systems is currently integrating its SPICE 1000 precision-guided glide bomb into the F-35 stealth fighter jet.

The project, being carried out in cooperation with the aircraft’s manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, represents a significant step that could eventually enable additional countries operating the F-35 to acquire the Israeli-made weapon.

The project is being carried out at Lockheed Martin facilities in the United States and is expected to be completed within the next few months. Once completed, the Israel Air Force will be able to deploy the weapon directly from its F-35I “Adir” aircraft.

The SPICE 1000 is an advanced autonomous air-to-ground weapon developed by Rafael as part of its SPICE family, a development that earned the company the Israel Defense Prize. The system enables precision strikes against high-value and strategic targets at ranges of more than 120 kilometers.

The weapon is equipped with a unique electro-optical seeker that uses Scene Matching algorithms, allowing it to operate autonomously and with a high degree of precision even in electronic warfare environments where GNSS is denied, as well as in complex operational scenarios.

Systems from the SPICE family have been sold to several countries and are operational with air forces around the world. In the Israel Air Force, the weapon has served as a key strike capability for years, with extensive operational use from the F-15 and F-16 fleets, including during operations against Iran.

Rafael Lockheed-Martin begins integrating SPICE 1000 precision weapon on F35 Adir, add strike reach beyond 120km

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Inside the school where dogs learn to sniff out bed bugs and other pests

www.popsci.com/

Freedom, a beagle trained by Jeremy Ecker of The Bedbug Inspectors, demonstrates how he sniffs out bed bugs.

Any dog—even your own—can learn this valuable canine skill.

Lucky works for the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture. Her job is to track down spotted lanternfly eggs before they can hatch and cause trouble. She could have joined the police force, but during her training she discovered that would involve biting suspects—something she didn’t enjoy. So Lucky, a German Shepherd, joined the ranks of pest detection dogs, becoming the first dog in the United States trained to detect lanternfly eggs. Lanternflies are invasive pests that feed on a wide range of plants, damaging them in the process. 

Lucky was a graduate from the Penn Vet Working Dog Center, founded by veterinarian Dr. Cynthia Otto. Many dogs from the program go on to be police dogs or search-and-rescue dogs, but Lucky became “the poster child for detection of spotted lanternfly,” Otto says. 

A history of canine pest detection 

Thanks to their extraordinary sense of smell, dogs have been helping humans hunt down pests for decades. In 1979, a former police officer who once trained dogs to detect drugs and explosives, set up TADD (Termite and Ant Detection Dogs) Services Corporation. The employees were a team of beagles, trained to sniff out termites and carpenter ants, both of which cause damage to wooden structures.

Carpenter ants can be highly destructive to buildings. Video: Where You Might Find Carpenter Ants, @TownandCountryPestSolutions

Research found that trained dogs could detect the presence of termites with about 96 percent accuracy, and dogs trained to find one termite species could also detect four other types. This suggests that the dogs can smell a shared, termite scent, possibly something in the termite’s tough outer shell, or gases like methane and carbon dioxide given off by termite colonies. 

When bed bugs made a major comeback in the early 2000s, dogs were able to help, too. A 2008 study found that trained dogs could distinguish bed bugs from other household insects, like cockroaches, carpenter ants, and termites, with a 97.5 percent success rate. The dogs didn’t misidentify bed bugs when none were present, and could differentiate live bed bugs and their eggs from dead bed bugs, their empty outer shells, and feces with a 95 percent success rate. 

More recently, researchers have been training dogs to detect a host of agricultural pests, including a bacterium that attacks citrus trees (Candidatus Liberibacter asiaticus), wood boring longhorn beetles, and the spotted lanternfly. 

Now Otto and her team are about to launch a project to see if dogs can help detect the New World screwworm. Unlike typical maggots that just feed on dead tissue, screwworm larvae eat live tissue as well. 

“It’s just horrific, and it’s very devastating to the animals and to agriculture,” Otto says. The U.S. had previously wiped it out, but now it’s back, with several cases reported this year in cows, sheep, and dogs. If dogs can reliably find it, Otto hopes their work will create new approaches to eradicate the pest again.

How training works 

Dogs typically join the program at the Penn Vet Working Dog Center when they’re about eight weeks old. They learn to associate the target odor with a reward, Otto explains. Trainers first use a synthetic odor, 1‑bromooctane, a safe chemical that’s uncommon in the natural environment, to teach the rules of the sniff‑and‑reward game, before switching to real targets like lanternfly eggs. 

Most dogs are trained in multiple locations, with special emphasis placed on environments similar to where they’ll eventually be working, explains Otto. “They often start training in a simple environment and then as they progress, it gets more complex and more naturalistic.” 

The length of training depends on several factors. One is the uniqueness of the target odor. Otto explains that teaching a dog how to detect a pest is harder than teaching it to detect an explosive. 

With explosives, it’s often a simple “is it here or not?” problem. With pests, dogs have to tease out one very specific smell from a crowd of nearly identical smells, which makes the training much more demanding. 

Other factors that influence the length of training are the dog’s history (For instance, have they already learned to use their nose to find things?) and their personality. Otto says that dogs are like people: Some are “big‑picture” while others are very detail‑oriented. For pest detection, the detail‑focused dogs tend to do better.

Cody, the german shepherd, will first sit when he has found a pest and then on command will point with his paw and nose where exactly they are. Image: David Cooper / Contributor / Getty Images

Pest detection is not an easy task to teach. Sometimes dogs learn to “cheat.” For example, if a trainer always presents a lanternfly egg on a piece of tree bark, the dog may decide that “tree bark = reward” and never truly learn to detect the egg itself. 

The process of training dogs to detect pests has been a big learning curve for Otto and her colleagues: “What I like to say in our training is we’ve made every mistake, so we’ve learned a lot,” she jokes. 

Could your pet dog help fight pests? 

Some researchers are trying to see if people’s pet dogs can do pest detection work. 

A 2025 study at Virginia Tech found that pet dogs, with only hobby-level scent training, could detect lanternfly egg masses 82 percent of the time in controlled conditions. In real-world settings, accuracy dropped to 61 percent, which is still better than many human searches. 

Otto pushes back against the common misconception that only a few breeds can do this work. While some breeds may rely more on their sharp eyesight than they do on smell, such as sighthounds, “In general, most dogs are going to be pretty good at using their noses,” Otto says. 

“In our program, we tend to use a lot of Labradors and shepherds, but so many different breeds are good at it and can be good at it.” What really matters is the dog’s personality and their motivation to do scent work, not their breed, she says.

A Two-Month-Long Meteor Shower Has Just Started, And Now's Also A Good Time To Watch Neptune At Its Brightest

www.iflscience.com/a-two-month-long-meteor-shower-has-just-started-and-nows-also-a-good-time-to-watch-neptune-at-its-brightest-84767

The next few weeks offer plenty of celestial spectacles for the amateur astronomers among you to enjoy.

We had a summer of eclipses in the northern hemisphere, and we are going into a fall of bright planets and meteor showers. Though our friends in the south didn't get the solar eclipse, they will be seeing many of these upcoming astronomical sights, with the benefit of warmer nights as they hunt for the fireballs of the southern taurids. 

First and foremost, it’s a full moon tomorrow. It’s the so-called Harvest Moon, which will be a stunning sight if you are looking at the sky with your naked eye. Not as stunning as the remaining three full moons of 2026, however, which will all be supermoons. 

What's a supermoon, you ask? Well, the Moon gets closer and farther from Earth in its orbit, so when the full moon happens while it's at a closer point in that cycle, the Moon looks larger and brighter. The dates for the three full supermoons are October 26, November 24, and December 23.

If you have a telescope, you might be a bit annoyed that there is a full Moon tomorrow, because tomorrow also sees Neptune at opposition. Opposition is when Earth, the Sun, and that planet lie on a single straight line, so the planet, in this case the distant Neptune, is at its brightest and closest.

Neptune will continue to be bright for a while, however, so you still have time to see it at a later date. And if you are pointing your telescope at the sky, you might as well look for galaxy NGC 7331 and the supernova currently near its center as well. 

When it comes to opposition, you have a better chance with Saturn. It will be at opposition next Saturday, October 4. It is already plenty visible, but it will get brighter, and the moon will be in its waning quarter so it won't compete as much as the full moon tomorrow. Also, there's no need for a telescope to see the "Lord of the Rings," you can see it with your naked eyes. 

The trick to spotting a planet is simple. Unlike stars, planets don't twinkle. A star might as well be a point of light, so turbulence in the atmosphere makes this point move about. Planets are little disks, so turbulence doesn't have the same effect. 

Saturn will be visible to the east in the early hours of the night, so look that way to spot it.

 

Last but certainly not least, the Southern Taurids meteor shower. This is one of the longest meteor showers we get, with fragments of comet Encke streaking across the sky from this week all the way to December. 

The peak is expected to be the night of November 4 and November 5, which will be a fair night for meteor watching as the Moon will be in its waning crescent. 

The Southern Taurids are known as the Halloween fireballs because they peak around the holiday. These meteors tend to have chonkier pieces than the average, and when it comes to meteors, size does matter, as larger ones are a lot brighter. 

Same advice as with other meteor showers. Put your phone down and let your eyes adjust to the darkness. The Taurids radiate from the constellation of Taurus, so look for it (or the more iconic and nearby Orion).

Mysterious Rock Formation in Jezero Crater Reveals Mars’ Complex Watery Past

www.sci.news/space/margin-unit-jezero-crater-mars-complex-watery-past-15084.html

The concentric feature in the East Margin of the Margin unit, Jezero crater, Mars. 

Image credit: Bedford et al., doi: 10.1038/s43247-026-03997-9.

Using data collected by NASA’s Perseverance rover, planetary scientists have revealed that a geologically puzzling formation in Jezero crater experienced multiple distinct episodes of water-related alteration, deepening its significance as a target in the search for ancient signs of life on Mars.

NASA’s Perseverance rover landed in Jezero crater in February 2021 to investigate the geological record and look for signs of ancient life. Jezero crater is 45 km (28 miles) in diameter and is situated on the northwestern side of the 1,200 km (746-mile) Isidis impact basin, and northeast of the Syrtis Major volcanic province near a region known as Nilli Fossae. In new research, Purdue University planetary scientist Candice Bedford and colleagues focused on the Margin unit, a band of olivine- and carbonate-rich rock that traces the inner rim of the crater near an ancient lake shoreline.

Using chemical and imaging data gathered by Perseverance’s SuperCam instrument across more than 185 rock targets, they determined that the unit originated as a crystalline, olivine-rich igneous rock, likely formed by slow cooling deep within a magma body. “Igneous rocks are excellent record-keepers, particularly because mineral crystals within them preserve details about the precise moment they formed,” the researchers said. “In this case, they preserved an astonishingly complex record of water activity on early Mars.” Below what they believe was once the second terrace level of the ancient Jezero lake, the scientists identified evidence of three separate fluid-driven alteration events. First, carbon dioxide-rich fluids moving through cracks in the bedrock formed carbonate-rich deposits that later eroded into distinctive ridges. Later, exposure to lake water or shifting groundwater chemistry remobilized that carbonate and precipitated silica into pore spaces within the rock. Finally, hydrothermal fluids surged through younger fractures, depositing veins rich in fluorite and calcium-sulfate minerals, a signature more commonly associated with hydrothermal systems on Earth. 

The authors also found signs that parts of the Margin unit were physically reworked by lake-shore or debris-flow processes. “Before we arrived at the Margin unit, the main hypothesis — derived from orbital observations — was that the carbonate seen from orbit formed from interaction with the lake that existed in Jezero crater,” Dr. Bedford said. “But now we know that this location became a sort of crossroads for aqueous systems.” “The Margin unit findings are important because Jezero crater sits inside one of the largest exposures of carbonate on Mars, so what we learn here reaches well beyond this crater.” “Some of the Margin unit rocks also contain silica,” added Dr. Eleni Ravanis, a planetary scientist at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. “Turning olivine into carbonate can leave silica behind, and we see more of that silica in rocks that sat below the water line.” The team’s results suggest the Margin unit’s alteration was driven by a combination of groundwater circulation and possible direct interaction with the Jezero paleolake over an extended period. “The Margin unit recorded a complex aqueous history driven by multiple alteration events from distinct groundwaters and/or exposure to the lake, cementing the Margin unit and the samples collected by Perseverance as primary targets of astrobiological interest,” the researchers concluded. 

Their paper appears in the journal Communications Earth & Environment. _____ C.C. Bedford et al. 2026. Lake- and groundwater-associated alteration of the olivine-rich Margin unit in Jezero crater, Mars. Commun Earth Environ 7, 728; doi: 10.1038/s43247-026-03997-9