NASA executives and experts struck an urgent tone with Congress earlier this week over discussions pertaining to the space agency’s nuclear budget. Oh, I’m sorry. Did I sayNASA’s nuclear budget?Surely not. Right? Here’s a meaningful quote via Paul Brinkmanwriting for UPI: ‘Strategic competitors including China are aggressively investing in a wide range of space technologies, including nuclear power and propulsion,’ Bhavya Lal, NASA’s senior advisor for budget and finance, said during a congressional committee hearing Wednesday morning....

A team of US government scientists working with NASA recently published a science article outlining a new “framework” for reporting scientific findings in the search for extraterrestrial life. The proposed guidelines would create a “confidence scale” in order to “set reasonable expectations” about NASA’s endeavors to track down evidence of alien life. Per the team’sarticle: The search for such evidence is often framed as an all-or-nothing proposition: either a mission returns definitive evidence of life or it has fallen short of its objective....

Asteroids are remnants of the early Solar System, with the potential to reveal secrets of our planet’s origins. But they could also bring an end to life on Earth. Now two missions,LucyandDART(Double Asteroid Redirection Test) will provide further insights into both of these features – with DART even attempting to redirect the orbit of a moon around an asteroid. Space rocks are generally considered to be asteroids if they are larger than approximately 1km in size and made of “non-volatile” materials – chemicals that can be easily vaporized....

New observations of the Mars reveal evidence of volcanic eruptions on that world during the last 50,000 years. This remarkably short period of time (on geological or astronomical scales) could alter our views of the geology — and potential biology — of the Red Planet. Three to four billion years before our time, volcanoes erupted across the surface of the Red Planet. Smaller, more localized, eruptions continued until three million years ago....

NASA’sJuno mission, the solar-powered robotic explorer of Jupiter, has completed itsfive-year prime missionto reveal the inner workings of the solar system’s biggest planet. Since 2016, the spacecraft has flown within a few thousand kilometers of Jupiter’s colorful cloud tops every 53 days, using a carefully selected array of instruments to peer deeper into the planet than ever before. The most recent findings from these measurements have now been published in a series of papers, revealing the three-dimensional structure of Jupiter’s weather systems – including its famous Great Red Spot, a centuries-old storm big enough to swallow the Earth whole....