The US Government Accountability Office (GAO) has dismissed protests from Blue Origin and defense contractor Dynetics over NASA’s decision to hand out a single $2.9 billion contract to SpaceX as part of its Human Landing System Program. On Friday, the watchdog said NASA’s “evaluation of all three proposals was reasonable and consistent with applicable procurement law, regulation, and the announcement’s terms.”

When Blue Origin first challenged the lunar lander contract in April, the company claimed the selection process was “fundamentally unfair” because it didn’t get a chance to revise its bid. To that point, NASA could afford to give SpaceX the contract because the company agreed to modify its payment schedule. Blue Origin also took issue with the fact that the space agency selected a single contractor for the project when the initial announcement had called for two manufacturers to be involved.

In reviewing NASA’s decision, the GAO says the space agency “did not violate procurement law or regulation when it decided to make only one award.” It notes NASA gave itself the flexibility to hand out a single contract, multiple awards or none at all when it first announced the Human Landing System Program. 

What’s more, the GAO concluded there “was no requirement for NASA to engage in discussions, amend, or cancel the announcement” due to the amount of funding it had available for the project. Notably, the GAO also points in its press release that its role is not to judge the relative merits of a contract decision. Both Blue Origin and Dynetics had argued that NASA chose the most “high risk option available” since SpaceX’s bid involved its Starship rocket, which at that point in the procurement process had yet to land in one piece.

The decision comes mere days after Blue Origin founder and former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos offered to waive $2 billion in payments from NASA in return for a lunar lander contract. Following Blue Origin’s protest, NASA told SpaceX to stop work on the Human Landing System while the GAO sorted out the challenge. Today's decision allows the project and the Artemis program more broadly to move forward unless Blue Origin asks the US Court of Federal Claims to examine the case. 

A group of scientists has discovered two unusually red objects in the asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars, and they may have originated from farther in the solar system. These objects — called 203 Pompeja and 269 Justitia — are redder than the reddest known objects in the asteroid belt and may have migrated to the area from beyond Neptune. If that's true, then they could provide insight into the chaos of the early solar system and into how the solar system as we know it today came to be.

The team led by JAXA's Sunao Hasegawa identified the objects through observations collected at the Infra-red Telescope Facility and Seoul National University Astronomical Observatory, according to the paper they published. As The New York Times points out, most objects in the inner solar system tend to reflect blue light, because they're devoid of or have very little organic materials. Objects from the outer solar system such as the Kuiper belt, however, tend to be redder. That's because they have a lot of organics like carbon and methane, which may have been the building blocks of our planet. As you may know, the Kuiper belt is the region extending from the orbit of Neptune where you can find remnants of our solar system's formation.

If Pompeja and Justitia truly were transplants from beyond Nepture, then they'd serve as evidence for the hypothesis that a fraction of the asteroids between Jupiter and Mars came from the Kuiper belt. They'd also support the set of theories, called the Nice Model, on how our gas giants settled into their orbits. The Nice model says our giant planets formed closer to the Sun until an instability forced Neptune, Uranus and Saturn to move outwards and Jupiter to move inwards. The event would've caused asteroids rich in organic materials to scatter and move around the solar system. 

Of course, more observations and evidence are needed to be able to prove that the two objects are from the Kuiper belt. The good thing is that since the asteroid belt is much closer to us than Neptune, it would take a spacecraft less time to reach them if ever Earth's space agencies decide to send a probe to study them more closely.

Rocket Lab has successfully launched a US military satellite in its first mission since its 20th Electron launch ended up in failure back in May. The company's Electron rocket made its way to space from its New Zealand launch site, carrying a small demonstration satellite from the US Space Force called the Monolith. Peter Beck, Rocket Lab founder and CEO, tweeted shortly after the event that the payload was deployed and praised the team for a "flawless" launch.

Monolith's target location is in low-Earth orbit around 370 miles above our planet. The satellite will demonstrate the use of a deployable sensor, "where the sensor's mass is a substantial fraction of the total mass of the spacecraft, changing the spacecraft’s dynamic properties and testing ability to maintain spacecraft attitude control," Rocket Lab explained in the official mission webpage. The results from the demonstration will help companies build more affordable satellites within shorter timeframes.

Rocket Lab's 20th mission failed in May when it suffered an "anomaly" after the second stage ignition. The company lost both its Electron rocket and BlackSky's Earth observation satellite payloads as a result of its second launch failure within the span of a year. After investigating the issue, Rocket Lab determined that the root cause was a problem with the second stage engine igniter system that "induced a corruption of signals within the engine computer." The company says it has since implemented fixes "to prevent any future reoccurrence."

The US Space Force is gearing up to launch a research and development satellite on Thursday with the help of Rocket Lab. The company's Electron rocket is scheduled to launch from a site in New Zealand sometime between 2AM and 4AM ET (6PM-8PM local time) to take the Monolith satellite into low Earth orbit.

The aim of the mission, which is called "It's a Little Chile Up Here" (a reference to the green chile from the Space Test Program's New Mexico home), is to test small satellites for the Department of Defense. Monolith will help determine whether it's large deployable sensors are feasible. Such sensors account for a significant proportion of a spacecraft's total mass. Since the sensor may alter the spacecraft’s dynamic properties, the mission will examine whether it's possible to maintain altitude control after the sensor has been deployed.

"Analysis from the use of a deployable sensor aims to enable the use of smaller satellite buses when building future deployable sensors such as weather satellites, thereby reducing the cost, complexity, and development timelines," Rocket Lab wrote in a statement. "The satellite will also provide a platform to test future space protection capabilities."

You can watch the launch as it happens on the Rocket Lab website. A stream may also be available on Rocket Lab's YouTube channel.

Scientists have discovered the first evidence of water vapor on Ganymede, Jupiter's largest moon. They used new and archival datasets from the Hubble Space Telescope to find the vapor, which forms when ice on the surface sublimates and turns from solid to gas.

A team led by Lorenz Roth of the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden examined data captured by Hubble's Cosmic Origins Spectrograph in 2018 and images the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph obtained between 1998 and 2010. Ultraviolet images captured by the STIS in 1998 showed “colorful ribbons of electrified gas called auroral bands,” according to NASA (which launched Hubble as a joint project with the European Space Agency).

Researchers previously believed that atomic oxygen may have caused discrepancies between UV images that were captured over time. However, using data from the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, Roth's team found that there was barely any atomic oxygen in the moon's atmosphere. As such, there had to be another reason for the discrepancies.

The temperature at Ganymede's equator may become warm enough for surface ice to release some water molecules. When they re-examined the relative distribution of the aurora in the UV images, Roth's team found that differences between them match up with where water would be expected in the moon's atmosphere.

Previous research indicated that Ganymede may hold more water than in all of our oceans. The moon's ocean is believed to be around 100 miles below the surface, so the vapor isn't from there. Water on the surface is frozen due to the moon’s temperatures.

The finding arrived ahead of the ESA's wonderfully named upcoming mission, JUICE, or JUpiter ICy moons Explorer. The mission should launch in 2022 and arrive at Jupiter in 2029. It will then spend at least three years examining the planet and three of its largest moons. JUICE will pay special attention to Ganymede, both as a planetary body and possible habitat. 

"Our results can provide the JUICE instrument teams with valuable information that may be used to refine their observation plans to optimize the use of the spacecraft," Roth said in a statement. 

NASA's Juno mission has also been studying Ganymede and Jupiter's environment (aka the Jovian system) since 2016. The agency says examining the Jovian system and understanding its history "will provide us with a better understanding of how gas giant planets and their satellites form and evolve. In addition, new insights will hopefully be found on the habitability of Jupiter-like exoplanetary systems."

A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket will be launching NASA's long-awaited mission to Europa, Jupiter's icy moon that may have the conditions to support life. The agency has been planning to send a probe to the Jovian moon for years and finalized its plans in 2019. In its announcement, NASA said the Europa Clipper spacecraft is scheduled to launch in October 2024 on top of a Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center's Launch Complex 39A. It has also revealed that the contract will cost the agency approximately $178 million — a bargain, compared to what it would've cost to launch the mission on top of NASA's Space Launch System rocket.

As Ars Technica notes, Congress originally urged NASA to use the SLS to launch the Europa Clipper. At the time, though, the White House estimated a single SLS launch to cost a whopping $2 billion. Far from ideal, especially since the SLS would need gravity assist from Venus and travel farther to be able to reach its goal, whereas the Falcon Heavy wouldn't. In addition, NASA told Ars that the SLS would need $1 billion worth of additional modifications to be able to complete the mission. 

If Europa Clipper launches in October 2024 as planned, it will reach Jupiter's orbit in April 2030. The probe will then investigate whether the icy moon truly has conditions suitable for life. It'll capture "high-resolution images of Europa's surface, determine its composition, look for signs of recent or ongoing geological activity, measure the thickness of the moon's icy shell, search for subsurface lakes, and determine the depth and salinity of Europa's ocean."

While scientists have found plenty of exoplanets over the years, they've yet to spot to moons orbiting those worlds outside our solar system. Now, a group of astronomers has discovered (PDF) what's believed to be a region with exomoons-in-the-making for the first time. Myriam Benisty and team from the University of Grenoble found the disk of dust — the moon-forming region — around a young exoplanet in a star system dubbed PDS 70 located 370 light years from Earth. 

The team found the first protoplanet (PDS 70b) in the system back in 2018 using European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile. A year later, they found another young gas giant (PDS 70c) using the same equipment. The astronomers believe based on the data they have that the star system is only 10 million years old and that both gas giants are several times bigger than Jupiter. To know more about the system, they focused all other possible instruments on it, including the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array. ALMA is made up of 66 short-wavelength radio dishes, and its observations made it possible to spot the dust around PDS 70c.

The disk of dust spans a distance slightly wider than that between Earth and the Sun, and there's enough mass in there for three moons the same size as ours. Benisty says the moons may have already formed, but there's no conclusive proof yet because they can't be seen with ALMA. According to Science, the Extremely Large Telescope, which will be the world's largest optical telescope when it's built, may have the power to see if the moons have already formed around the protoplanet. The telescope is still under construction, though, and scientific operations won't start until 2027 at the earliest. 

NASA's InSight lander arrived on Mars in 2018 to learn about its interior by monitoring "marsquakes," and now the project is starting to really pay off. NASA has announced that researchers have mapped the red planet's interior and discovered some big surprises and major differences with Earth. 

The map is the first ever of the interior of another planet. Compared to Earth, Mars has a thicker crust, thinner mantle layer and a bigger, less dense and more liquid core than expected. That in turn suggests that Mars may have formed millions of years before our planet, when the sun itself was still not fully formed. 

"It gives us our first sample of the inside of another rocky planet like Earth, built out of the same materials but very, very different," University of Cambridge seismologist Sanne Cottaar (who wasn't involved in the project) told the Wall Street Journal. “It is impressive.”

Constructing a map from the limited data provided by InSight was no easy feat. The probe only recorded quakes from one location and has just a single seismometer, for one thing. And Mars — while seismically active — didn't have any quakes larger than around 4 on the Richter scale. 

Science

Still, taking that data, along with planet's magnetism and orbital wobbles, scientists were able to create a detailed map. The planet's innermost core was found to have a diameter of around 2,275 miles, larger than previously thought. Given the mass of the planet as a whole, that implies that the iron/nickel core likely contains lighter elements like sulfur, oxygen and carbon. 

The crust, meanwhile, was found to be very old. It was also thicker in Mars' southern highlands and thinner in the northern lowlands, which may have hosted oceans long ago. On average, it's between 15 and 45 miles thick and split into several layers of volcanic rock.

The mantle between the crust and core extends roughly 970 miles below the surface. It's thinner than Earth's and has a different composition which suggests the two planets arose from different materials when they formed. This “might be the simple explanation why we don’t see plate tectonics on Mars,” ETH Zurich geophysicist and study co-author Amir Khan told the New York Times. 

The results has given scientists new insight into not just the inside of Mars, but how rocky planets form in general. That will help them develop new theories about planet formation that could become particularly valuable in the near future, when new instruments like the James Webb Space Telescope will allow astronomers to scan exoplanets around the galaxy. NASA will reveal more about its findings in a live event later today. 

NASA's Curiosity rover might be sitting near a wealth of information that might hint at signs of life on Mars. New Scientist and Space.com note that Caltech researchers have identified six locations for methane "burps" (that is, emissions blips) on the planet, including one just a few dozen miles west southwest from Curiosity. Ideally, the rover could investigate the emissions and determine their true nature.

Curiosity has detected the methane spurts six times since landing on Mars in 2012, but scientists haven't had success locating their sources until now. Europe's Trace Gas Orbiter has also failed to spot methane at atmospheric levels. The Caltech team narrowed down the on-the-ground sources by modelling methane particles as packets and tracing their routes based on historical wind velocity.

The research hasn't yet been peer-reviewed, so we'd take it with a grain of caution. It's also entirely possible that the gas has non-organic origins. Even if that's the case, though, the burps could be tied to geological activity linked to liquid water. Early Mars reportedly held massive amounts of water — even if there's no active water at these sources, a close-up study could help illustrate Mars' history.

On May 5, 1961, Commander Alan Shepard piloted his Mercury Freedom 7 spacecraft to a soaring height of 116 miles above the planet's surface to become the first American to reach Earth's orbit. This past Sunday, Sir Richard Branson was escorted to an altitude of 50 miles aboard Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo Unity. Somehow, these men are now both considered astronauts.

The discrepancy here lies in the fact that since the Space Era began, the world's exo-planetary powers have never really gotten around to formalizing where the Earth's atmosphere ends and where "space" — loosely defined as it is — begins. Even within the US federal bureaucracy, different agencies use different standards. What NASA mission control considers the edge of space is actually 26 miles farther out than where the NOAA and US Air Force demark the atmospheric boundary. So the next time you find yourself hurtling through the Mesosphere, keep a close eye on your altimeter if you want to earn the coveted Astronaut Badge.