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Mysterious Flash on Jupiter Left No Debris Cloud
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By European Space Agency
Video: 00:08:04 Space Debris: Is it a Crisis?
The European Space Agency’s short documentary film ‘Space Debris: Is it a Crisis?’ on the state of space debris premiered at the 9th European Conference on Space Debris on 1 April 2025.
Earth is surrounded by thousands of satellites carrying out important work to provide telecommunications and navigation services, help us understand our climate, and answer fundamental questions about the Universe.
However, as our use of space accelerates like never before, these satellites find themselves navigating increasingly congested orbits in an environment criss-crossed by streams of fast-moving debris fragments resulting from collisions, fragmentations and breakups in space.
Each fragment can damage additional satellites, with fears that a cascade of collisions may eventually render some orbits around Earth no longer useable. Additionally, the extent of the harm of the drastic increase in launches and number of objects re-entering our atmosphere and oceans is not yet known.
So, does space debris already represent a crisis?
The documentary explores the current situation in Earth’s orbits and explains the threat space debris poses to our future in space. It also outlines what might be done about space debris and how we might reach true sustainability in space, because our actions today will have consequences for generations to come.
ESA’s Space Safety Programme
ESA’s Space Safety Programme aims to safeguard the future of spaceflight and to keep us, Earth and our infrastructure on the ground and in space safe from hazards originating in space.
From asteroids and solar storms to the human-made problem of space debris, ESA works on missions and projects to understand the dangers and mitigate them.
In the longer term, to ensure a safe and sustainable future in space, ESA aims to establish a circular economy in space. To get there, the Agency is working on the technology development necessary to make in-orbit servicing and zero-debris spacecraft a reality.
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By NASA
2 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
The Double Asteroid Redirection Test required extreme precision in mission planning to achieve its mission of impacting an asteroid. The founders of Continuum Space worked on astrodynamics relating to this mission, which they used to inform their product.NASA Planning space missions is a very involved process, ensuring orbits are lined up and spacecraft have enough fuel is imperative to the long-term survival of orbital assets. Continuum Space Systems Inc. of Pasadena, California, produces a cloud-based platform that gives mission planners everything they need to certify that their space resources can accomplish their goals.
Continuum’s story begins at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. Loic Chappaz, the company’s co-founder, started at JPL as an intern working on astrodynamics related to NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test. There he met Leon Alkalai, a JPL technical fellow who spent his 30-year career at the center planning deep space missions. After Alkalai retired from NASA, he founded Mandala Space Ventures, a startup that explored several avenues of commercial space development. Chappaz soon became Mandala’s first employee, but to plan their future, Mandala’s leadership began thinking about the act of planning itself.
Because the staff had decades of combined experience at JPL, they knew the center had the building blocks for the software they needed. After licensing several pieces of software from JPL, the company began building planning systems that were highly adaptable to any space mission they could come up with. Mandala eventually evolved into a venture firm that incubated space-related startups. However, because Mandala had invested considerably in developing mission-planning tools, further development could be performed by a new company, and Continuum was fully spun off from Mandala in 2021.
Continuum’s platform includes several features for mission planners, such as plotting orbital maneuvers and risk management evaluations. Some of these are built upon software licensed from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.Continuum Space Systems Inc. Continuum’s tools are designed to take a space mission from concept to completion. There are three different components to their “mission in a box” — design, build and test, and mission operations. The base of these tools are several pieces of software developed at NASA. As of 2024, several space startups have begun planning missions with Continuum’s NASA-inspired software, as well as established operators of satellite constellations. From Continuum to several startups, NASA technologies continue to prove a valuable foundation for the nation’s space economy.
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Last Updated Mar 25, 2025 Related Terms
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By USH
Io, Jupiter’s famous volcanic moon, is already the most volcanically active place in the solar system. But between Halloween and Christmas of 2024, something happened that was extreme, even by Io’s standards.
Its south pole erupted in a way astronomers weren’t even sure was possible. A super volcano exploded with such force that it was visible from space as a massive dark blotch in the atmosphere. In infrared, the eruption was so intense that it saturated scientific sensors.
How Big Was This Eruption? To grasp the scale, imagine Io were the size of Earth. This super volcano would cover an area larger than Texas, larger than Egypt. The aftermath would trigger a global volcanic winter lasting years, possibly decades.
The eruption unleashed energy equivalent to 260 Yellowstone's and its lava field could bury everything from New York to Kansas under 10 feet of molten rock or stretch from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes. Every minute, the eruption released energy equal to 1.5 million Hiroshima bombs.
Just think about this: Earth’s most devastating volcanic event, the Siberian Traps eruption, lasted for a million years and led to one of the worst mass extinctions in history. Io’s super volcano, at its current rate, would surpass that in just 800 years. Over a million years, it could spew out the equivalent of 1% of Earth’s entire mantle. If the volume of this eruption were spread evenly across Earth, our planet’s landscape would be completely transformed in a matter of days.
Even in a solar system filled with astonishing phenomena, Io continues to shock and surprise us.
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By NASA
Explore This Section Webb News Latest News Latest Images Blog (offsite) Awards X (offsite – login reqd) Instagram (offsite – login reqd) Facebook (offsite- login reqd) Youtube (offsite) Overview About Who is James Webb? Fact Sheet Impacts+Benefits FAQ Science Overview and Goals Early Universe Galaxies Over Time Star Lifecycle Other Worlds Observatory Overview Launch Orbit Mirrors Sunshield Instrument: NIRCam Instrument: MIRI Instrument: NIRSpec Instrument: FGS/NIRISS Optical Telescope Element Backplane Spacecraft Bus Instrument Module Multimedia About Webb Images Images Videos What is Webb Observing? 3d Webb in 3d Solar System Podcasts Webb Image Sonifications Team International Team People Of Webb More For the Media For Scientists For Educators For Fun/Learning 6 Min Read NASA’s Webb Peers Deeper into Mysterious Flame Nebula
This collage of images from the Flame Nebula shows a near-infrared light view from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope on the left, while the two insets at the right show the near-infrared view taken by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Credits:
NASA, ESA, CSA, M. Meyer (University of Michigan), A. Pagan (STScI) The Flame Nebula, located about 1,400 light-years away from Earth, is a hotbed of star formation less than 1 million years old. Within the Flame Nebula, there are objects so small that their cores will never be able to fuse hydrogen like full-fledged stars—brown dwarfs.
Brown dwarfs, often called “failed stars,” over time become very dim and much cooler than stars. These factors make observing brown dwarfs with most telescopes difficult, if not impossible, even at cosmically short distances from the Sun. When they are very young, however, they are still relatively warmer and brighter and therefore easier to observe despite the obscuring, dense dust and gas that comprises the Flame Nebula in this case.
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope can pierce this dense, dusty region and see the faint infrared glow from young brown dwarfs. A team of astronomers used this capability to explore the lowest mass limit of brown dwarfs within the Flame Nebula. The result, they found, were free-floating objects roughly two to three times the mass of Jupiter, although they were sensitive down to 0.5 times the mass of Jupiter.
“The goal of this project was to explore the fundamental low-mass limit of the star and brown dwarf formation process. With Webb, we’re able to probe the faintest and lowest mass objects,” said lead study author Matthew De Furio of the University of Texas at Austin.
Image A: Flame Nebula: Hubble and Webb Observations
This collage of images from the Flame Nebula shows a near-infrared light view from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope on the left, while the two insets at the right show the near-infrared view taken by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Much of the dark, dense gas and dust, as well as the surrounding white clouds within the Hubble image, have been cleared in the Webb images, giving us a view into a more translucent cloud pierced by the infrared-producing objects within that are young stars and brown dwarfs. Astronomers used Webb to take a census of the lowest-mass objects within this star-forming region.
The Hubble image on the left represents light at wavelengths of 1.05 microns (filter F105W) as blue, 1.3 microns (F130N) as green, and 1.39 microns (F129M) as red. The two Webb images on the right represent light at wavelengths of 1.15 microns and 1.4 microns (filters F115W and F140M) as blue, 1.82 microns (F182M) as green, 3.6 microns (F360M) as orange, and 4.3 microns (F430M) as red. NASA, ESA, CSA, M. Meyer (University of Michigan), A. Pagan (STScI) Smaller Fragments
The low-mass limit the team sought is set by a process called fragmentation. In this process large molecular clouds, from which both stars and brown dwarfs are born, break apart into smaller and smaller units, or fragments.
Fragmentation is highly dependent on several factors with the balance between temperature, thermal pressure, and gravity being among the most important. More specifically, as fragments contract under the force of gravity, their cores heat up. If a core is massive enough, it will begin to fuse hydrogen. The outward pressure created by that fusion counteracts gravity, stopping collapse and stabilizing the object (then known as a star). However, fragments whose cores are not compact and hot enough to burn hydrogen continue to contract as long as they radiate away their internal heat.
“The cooling of these clouds is important because if you have enough internal energy, it will fight that gravity,” says Michael Meyer of the University of Michigan. “If the clouds cool efficiently, they collapse and break apart.”
Fragmentation stops when a fragment becomes opaque enough to reabsorb its own radiation, thereby stopping the cooling and preventing further collapse. Theories placed the lower limit of these fragments anywhere between one and ten Jupiter masses. This study significantly shrinks that range as Webb’s census counted up fragments of different masses within the nebula.
“As found in many previous studies, as you go to lower masses, you actually get more objects up to about ten times the mass of Jupiter. In our study with the James Webb Space Telescope, we are sensitive down to 0.5 times the mass of Jupiter, and we are finding significantly fewer and fewer things as you go below ten times the mass of Jupiter,” De Furio explained. “We find fewer five-Jupiter-mass objects than ten-Jupiter-mass objects, and we find way fewer three-Jupiter-mass objects than five-Jupiter-mass objects. We don’t really find any objects below two or three Jupiter masses, and we expect to see them if they are there, so we are hypothesizing that this could be the limit itself.”
Meyer added, “Webb, for the first time, has been able to probe up to and beyond that limit. If that limit is real, there really shouldn’t be any one-Jupiter-mass objects free-floating out in our Milky Way galaxy, unless they were formed as planets and then ejected out of a planetary system.”
Image B: Low Mass Objects within the Flame Nebula in Infrared Light
This near-infrared image of a portion of the Flame Nebula from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope highlights three low-mass objects, seen in the insets to the right. These objects, which are much colder than protostars, require the sensitivity of Webb’s instruments to detect them. These objects were studied as part of an effort to explore the lowest mass limit of brown dwarfs within the Flame Nebula.
The Webb images represent light at wavelengths of 1.15 microns and 1.4 microns (filters F115W and F140M) as blue, 1.82 microns (F182M) as green, 3.6 microns (F360M) as orange, and 4.3 microns (F430M) as red. NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, M. Meyer (University of Michigan) Building on Hubble’s Legacy
Brown dwarfs, given the difficulty of finding them, have a wealth of information to provide, particularly in star formation and planetary research given their similarities to both stars and planets. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has been on the hunt for these brown dwarfs for decades.
Even though Hubble can’t observe the brown dwarfs in the Flame Nebula to as low a mass as Webb can, it was crucial in identifying candidates for further study. This study is an example of how Webb took the baton—decades of Hubble data from the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex—and enabled in-depth research.
“It’s really difficult to do this work, looking at brown dwarfs down to even ten Jupiter masses, from the ground, especially in regions like this. And having existing Hubble data over the last 30 years or so allowed us to know that this is a really useful star-forming region to target. We needed to have Webb to be able to study this particular science topic,” said De Furio.
“It’s a quantum leap in our capabilities between understanding what was going on from Hubble. Webb is really opening an entirely new realm of possibilities, understanding these objects,” explained astronomer Massimo Robberto of the Space Telescope Science Institute.
This team is continuing to study the Flame Nebula, using Webb’s spectroscopic tools to further characterize the different objects within its dusty cocoon.
“There’s a big overlap between the things that could be planets and the things that are very, very low mass brown dwarfs,” Meyer stated. “And that’s our job in the next five years: to figure out which is which and why.”
These results are accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Image C (Animated): Flame Nebula (Hubble and Webb Comparison)
This animated image alternates between a Hubble Space Telescope and a James Webb Space Telescope observation of the Flame Nebula, a nearby star-forming nebula less than 1 million years old. In this comparison, three low-mass objects are highlighted. In Hubble’s observation, the low-mass objects are hidden by the region’s dense dust and gas. However, the objects are brought out in the Webb observation due to Webb’s sensitivity to faint infrared light. NASA, ESA, CSA, Alyssa Pagan (STScI) The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb is solving mysteries in our solar system, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).
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Media Contacts
Laura Betz – laura.e.betz@nasa.gov
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Matthew Brown – mabrown@stsci.edu
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.
Christine Pulliam – cpulliam@stsci.edu
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.
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Last Updated Mar 10, 2025 Editor Marty McCoy Contact Laura Betz laura.e.betz@nasa.gov Related Terms
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By USH
EBANI stands for "Unidentified Anomalous Biological Entity," referring to a mysterious class of airborne phenomena that may be biological rather than mechanical in nature. These entities are often described as elongated, flexible, and tubular, moving through the sky in a serpentine or twisting manner.
They exhibit advanced flight capabilities, including high-speed travel, precise control, and even self-illumination. Some have been observed rendering themselves invisible, raising questions about their energy sources and possible technological origins.
Recent observations have revealed formations of translucent spheres in red, white, and blue, challenging conventional classifications of both biology and aerodynamics.
Some of these entities have a massive structure composed of thousands of clustered spheres. These entities appear to function as an aircraft carrier, releasing these smaller spheres into Earth's atmosphere for an unknown purpose.
While some researchers propose that EBANIs are natural organisms evolving in Earth's upper atmosphere under unfamiliar physical laws, others speculate they may be advanced artificial (eventually biological) constructs, potentially extraterrestrial probes or surveillance devices, given the presence of large structures expelling numerous smaller spheres.
Are they living UFOs, advanced biological organisms that function autonomously within the spheres, without the need for pilots?
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