An Enormous 'Cat's Tail' Tells of Cosmic Collision 63 Light-years Away
Known as the "Cat's Tail," a vast cloud of dust wafting across a young star system could be the aftermath of a collision between two or more Pluto-sized bodies annihilated to microscopically small dust grains.An Enormous 'Cat's Tail' Tells of Cosmic Collision 63 Light-years Away
By Daniel Stolte, University Communications - October 28, 2026
Sixty-three light-years from Earth, in the small, faint constellation known as Pictor (which is Latin for "painter"), there lies a strange structure that has puzzled astronomers for the last two years. Nicknamed the "Cat's Tail," this dark feature stretches across along an abyss of space about a thousand times the average distance between the Earth and the Sun.
The Cat's Tail was discovered in a so-called debris disk known as Beta Pictoris – another solar system not unlike ours, but much younger, having formed only a few million years ago. Now for the first time, astronomers have captured previously unseen details of the Cat's Tail in visible light, using the Hubble Space Telescope.
Led by University of Arizona planetary scientist Arin Avsar, the team reports its findings in a paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The combination of new and previous imaging going back over 14 years provide new insights on the location and nature of the substructure and further evidence for its likely violent origin.
This study's observations, made with the Hubble Space Telescope, revealed the "Cat's Tail" structure for the first time in the visible light spectrum (white arrow). Unlike the original discovery observations made with the James Webb Space Telescope, which detected the dust grain's heat emissions using infrared radiation, the tail appears shorter in the new images, because the further the trail of dust grains extends from the star, the less light they reflect. - Avsar et al.
"The Cat's Tail is thought to be the aftermath of a collision between large bodies – think something like Pluto," said Avsar, a doctoral student who works with Daniel Apai's and Kevin Wagner's research group in U of A's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory and Steward Observatory. "Oddly, this feature had previously only been seen with the James Webb Space Telescope, which detects infrared light, but remained invisible at shorter wavelengths, which has puzzled the community for a while."
With its planets neatly organized into a set of nestled orbits around the Sun and leftover space rocks relegated to "designated" asteroid belts, the solar system as we know it today belies its chaotic and violent birth 4.6 billion years ago: a disk of gas and dust swirling around the infant Sun, with space rocks smashing into each other and blowing each other apart, while only a few survived the cosmic jostling, accreted more mass and eventually grew into planets. To gather clues about what the young solar system would have looked like, astronomers turn to other star systems such as Beta Pictoris, a debris disk thought to be in the final stages of planet formation.
"We think the Cat's Tail has eluded our observations in visible light until now because of what it's made of," Avsar explained. "It consists almost entirely of we call organic refractory material, which is heavily carbon-based. These long chains of carbon atoms absorb visible light, so they're quite black."
Not only that, but the new observations also supported that the vast cloud – whose length could be as long as 200 trillion house cats lined up tail to snout – consists of micron-sized dust grains that are also extremely porous or "fluffy." In more astronomical terms, the structure could be as long as 1,000 astronomical units, with one AU being the average distance between the Earth and the Sun.
YouTube Video: Beta Pictoris Cat's Tail
"How you can get dust grains that small that are as porous as we see here, no one really understands, and that's part of why we study this feature," Avsar said.
As to what turned a nascent planetary body into micron-sized, surprisingly fluffy dust grains, Avsar said it's up to speculation, and further research could help bringing the picture into focus.
"It's possible that the velocities involved in the collisions were so high that the carbon grains vaporized, turned into gas, and then recondensed as they cooled, and that's how they became so porous," said co-author Wagner, an assistant research professor at the U of A Steward Observatory.
Combining Hubble's image data with JWST's infrared data and applying clever computer modeling, his team was able to tease out information about the Cat's Tail's three-dimensional structure. Based on previous observations, astronomers believed that the feature emanated from Beta Pictoris, the star at the center of the debris disk, which appears edge-on when viewed from Earth, and billows out far into space from the observer, fading into the space beyond the disk.
"We find that instead of extending for 1,000 astronomical units behind the star, the Cat's Tail may extend straight sideways relative to us, and there is no third dimension to it," Avsar said. "It's essentially in the same plane of the sky as the star and possibly extends a little bit behind it."
By using Hubble in a new configuration, Avsar's team also identified a new feature of the dust halo surrounding Beta Pictoris: a strange warp that the researchers believe is likely caused by the disk interacting with one of the three planets in the system: Beta Pic b, a gas giant about 10 times the mass of Jupiter.
"This gives us another line of evidence into how giant planets influence comets through their immense gravitational force," Avsar said. "It's a testament of how much these massive planets really influence their surrounding dust and icy bodies out to hundreds of astronomical units."
According to Avsar, this offers another clue to the processes that likely shaped the early solar system. When the Kuiper Belt was a mere 20 million years old, it is believed to have had a much higher density of bodies, potentially hundreds of Pluto-sized objects. In a way, the outer giant planets "cleared out" many of those former bodies by perturbing their orbits or ejecting them from the system altogether.
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Five Lessons from the OSIRIS-REx Asteroid Sample Return Mission
A U of A, Lunar and Planetary Laboratory-led NASA mission that helped transform how scientists understand asteroids and the history of our solar system officially came to an end Sept. 30.Five Lessons from the OSIRIS-REx Asteroid Sample Return Mission
By Daniel Stolte, University Marketing and Communications - October 20, 2026
A University of Arizona-led NASA mission that helped transform how scientists understand asteroids and the history of our solar system officially came to an end Sept. 30.
The OSIRIS-REx mission fulfilled its scientific objective with flying colors, scooping up a pristine sample of rock and dust from near-Earth asteroid Bennu in October 2020 and returning it to Earth three years later.
While the asteroid sample return portion is winding up, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft keeps on going – again under U of A leadership. Redesignated as OSIRIS-APEX, the van-sized space probe has embarked on a new mission to study near-Earth asteroid Apophis. Led by Dani Mendoza DellaGiustina, an assistant professor at the university's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, the OSIRIS-APEX mission aims to observe Apophis during the asteroid's close approach to Earth in 2029, which could provide unprecedented data on how Earth's gravity affects asteroids.
The majority of the 4.3 ounces of material tucked safely inside the capsule that parachuted down to the Utah desert on Sept. 24, 2023, remains under careful curation at NASA's specialized facilities, but portions have been distributed to research institutions, including the U of A. The mission has revolutionized what we know – or thought we knew – about asteroids and the history of our solar system.
Explore the OSIRIS-REx mission through images of asteroid Bennu, the spacecraft and the scientists who helped bring samples back to Earth in the gallery below.
Five of the mission's most interesting findings
Bennu's surface is much softer than scientists expected
Asteroid Bennu turned out to be "fluffier" than the rocky body it was believed to be. When the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft descended to the surface – sampling arm extended – on Oct. 20, 2020, the mission team braced for an experience resembling a pogo stick bouncing off a gravel road. To everybody's surprise, that didn't happen. Instead, when the sampling head contacted the surface, it dove right in with almost no resistance. Had the spacecraft not fired its thrusters to back away immediately after grabbing dust and rock from the asteroid's surface, it would have sunk right into Bennu, and the asteroid might have swallowed it whole. As OSIRIS-REx Principal Investigator Dante Lauretta explained, "The particles making up Bennu's exterior are so loosely packed and lightly bound to each other that they act more like a fluid than a solid."
Dante Lauretta
Bennu was covered in boulders, not smooth sand
In one of the biggest surprises of the mission, Bennu turned out to be a jagged world covered in large boulders, rather than the relatively smooth surface scientists had expected based on observations from Earth. "We expected some boulders, but we anticipated at least some large regions with smoother, finer regolith that would be easy to collect," said Andrew Ryan, a scientist with the U of A Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. "Instead, it looked like it was all boulders, and we were scratching our heads for a while."
Andrew Ryan
Courtesy of Andrew Ryan
Asteroids may have helped bring water to Earth
Long before oceans formed on Earth, oxygen and hydrogen – the building blocks of water – were already drifting through the void, trapped inside stone. While Bennu is too small to have ever hosted liquid water, scientists believe it once existed on Bennu's parent body, a much larger asteroid. The sample confirmed that the asteroid is saturated with water locked inside clay minerals. This discovery supports the theory that a steady drumbeat of asteroid bombardments during Earth's infancy delivered the water for the world's oceans.
The ingredients for life existed before Earth was formed
Bennu didn't just contain water; it preserved the raw chemistry of life itself. Scientists found abundant carbon and organic molecules, including stardust from other stars that are long dead and a high concentration of extraterrestrial amino acids, suggesting the some of the ingredients necessary for life were already floating in the interstellar dark long before our own planet consolidated into a solid ball.
Bennu’s composition suggests the ice and organic compounds in its parent asteroid came from the cold outer reaches of the disk of gas and dust that gave rise to the solar system. "We think this parent body was struck by an incoming asteroid and smashed apart," said LPL Associate Department Head Jessica Barnes. "Then the fragments re-assembled and this might have repeated several times."
Scientists also found evidence that some pieces of asteroid Vesta ended up on Bennu, suggesting that many asteroids participate in a complex orbital dance that sometimes results in cosmic mashups. In addition, minerals called evaporites, never before found in extraterrestrial samples, indicate that the interior of Bennu's ancestor was warm enough to support liquid water for possibly thousands of years.
Tracking Bennu helped scientists better predict asteroid threats
Researchers used precise tracking data from the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft to better understand Bennu's movements. The findings confirm that Bennu's estimated risk of impacting Earth late in the next century is much lower than previously thought and improve our ability to predict orbits of many other asteroids. Scientists have pinpointed Bennu's future orbits with unprecedented accuracy, determining its impact probability through the year 2300 is about 1 in 1,750, or 0.057%. Although the chances of hitting Earth are low, Bennu is still one of the two objects with the highest known impact risks in the solar system, along with another asteroid called 1950 DA.
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Three Years into Its Second Mission, OSIRIS-APEX Sets Its Sights on 2029
OSIRIS-APEX, the spacecraft that originally flew as OSIRIS-REx, is expected to reach the asteroid Apophis in late spring of 2029, but the team is already keeping the spacecraft busy.Three Years into Its Second Mission, OSIRIS-APEX Sets Its Sights on 2029
By Niranjana Rajalakshmi, University Communications - October 12, 2026
On the evening of April 13, 2029, the asteroid Apophis is expected to pass within about 20,000 miles of Earth's surface – closer than satellites carrying TV broadcasts and satellite images. A NASA spacecraft still on its way to meet the asteroid will capture a moment from deep space: a speck of light sliding past the side of Earth where night has fallen, over Europe and northern Africa. Millions of people will be able to watch it with their own eyes.
An asteroid this size comes so close to Earth only once about every 7,500 years.
Dani Mendoza DellaGiustina
Chris Richards/ University of Arizona Communications
"I think that's just going to be a really powerful sequence of images to help people understand how vulnerable we are," said Dani Mendoza DellaGiustina, associate professor at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory and the principal investigator of OSIRIS-APEX.
The spacecraft originally flew as OSIRIS-REx, the mission that brought a sample of the asteroid Bennu back to Earth in September 2023. It is expected to reach Apophis in late spring of 2029, but the team is already keeping the spacecraft busy.
"It's really cool getting to use this spacecraft for so many scientific investigations that nobody even imagined when it was originally proposed," DellaGiustina said.
Earth as a distant world
Currently, the team is writing the commands the spacecraft will follow when it swings past Earth next March. That flyby is one of the several gravity assists built into the mission's route, in which the spacecraft passes close to Earth and borrows some of our planet's energy to reshape its own path around the sun. Each flyby bends the spacecraft's path to line it up with Apophis.
The last flyby in September 2025 gave the team a chance to point the instruments to Earth – in August and September, as the spacecraft approached from millions of kilometers away, the team observed Earth as if it were a distant astronomical object, which is roughly how telescopes see planets orbiting other stars.
"Studying Earth as a habitable world from the perspective of a distant spacecraft that is seeing our own planet as it though it's an astronomical object is a really rare opportunity," DellaGiustina said.
She said the team has made a significant discovery in the data collected during the 2025 flyby. The team also plans to observe Earth the same way again before the March 2027 flyby, building on the 2025 results that it expects to publish. The new data will help recalibrate instruments whose behavior has drifted somewhat since the spacecraft launched in 2016.
An artist's illustration of Apophis's size.
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
Closer to the sun
Getting to Apophis involved making innovations with the spacecraft itself. The route requires an orbit that carries the spacecraft much closer to the sun than it was designed to survive. It has made three of those close passes already. To get through the passes, engineers tilt the spacecraft's wing-like solar panels, which sits on wrist-like joints, so that they cast shade over its heat-sensitive parts. The panels sit on hinged mounts that were originally meant to lift them clear of boulders when the spacecraft touched down on Bennu. The engineers called the protective pose "the fig leaf."
DellaGiustina said the approach has worked so far. However, three more close passes remain.
"I'm pretty confident after going through three passes already," she said.
Watching an asteroid shake
Once the spacecraft reaches Apophis in late spring 2029, the big question is what Earth's gravity will do to the asteroid. Although DellaGiustina's expectations haven't changed dramatically since NASA approved the OSIRIS-APEX mission in 2022, she said researchers have spent the past several years working through telescope observations of the asteroid and now have better answers on two things Earth's pull could change: how the asteroid spins and what its surface looks like.
The team had worried, for instance, that Earth's pull might change the asteroid's rotation so drastically that the spacecraft would not know the right cadence to observe it ahead of time. Also, predictions for how much the asteroid's surface will shift ranges from meter-scale changes to millimeter-scale changes that most spacecrafts could not detect. But OSIRIS-APEX has the resolution to detect them, DellaGiustina said.
As Earth's gravity pulls on Apophis during the close approach, the asteroid will shake hard enough that material on its surface could be thrown upward. DellaGiustina said that stretching and squeezing will shake Apophis so hard that the asteroid's weak gravity may not be able to hold everything down, with loose dust and rock tossing up off the surface.
"OSIRIS-APEX will be in a unique geometry to observe that shaking, which is very cool," she said.
Building the team for 2029
The mission has a few students on the team now. OSIRIS-REx trained more than 150, many of whom went on to work for NASA and its industry partners.
"It's a really important and personal part of our story – the number of students that we've trained," DellaGiustina said. "We'll continue to do that as we start ramping up our staffing the closer we get to arriving at Apophis."
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Tenacity, Triumph and Discovery: Looking Back at OSIRIS-REx at Mission's End
September 30, 2026 marked the formal end of NASA's OSIRIS-REX mission. This was the United State's first ambitious attempt to collect a sample of an asteroid and return it to Earth, and it was led by the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory.Tenacity, Triumph and Discovery: Looking Back at OSIRIS-REx at Mission's End
By Mikayla Mace Kelley, University Communications - October 7, 2026
Sept. 30 marked the formal end of NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission. This was the United States' first ambitious attempt to collect a sample of an asteroid and return it to Earth, and it was led by the University of Arizona.
In the more than two decades since its inception, the mission overcame several challenges to accomplish unprecedented feats of exploration and science.
In a letter of thanks and congratulations to his team, mission principal investigator Dante Lauretta, Regents Professor and director of the Arizona Astrobiology Center, reflected on a sentence from a report submitted to NASA at the mission's end: "Successful exploration missions are not those that avoid surprises, they are those that are deliberately designed to adapt to them."
"That certainly describes OSIRIS-REx," Lauretta said. "Again and again, the mission presented us with circumstances we had not expected, and again and again, this team found a way forward. I feel enormous pride in what we accomplished together, and real sadness that this journey has come to an end… It has been the privilege of my professional life to serve as principal investigator of OSIRIS-REx."
A dream made material
Where did we come from? How did we come to exist? What's the origin of the organic material that provided the building blocks that led to life? These were the deep questions that the late Michael Drake wanted answered when he first proposed the mission in 2004. At the time, Drake was the director of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory.
The tenacity that characterizes OSIRIS-REx team today was evident even then: NASA denied the proposal – twice – before greenlighting what would become the billion-dollar mission under the New Frontiers Program in 2011.
Former LPL director Michael Drake and current OSIRIS-REx principal investigator Dante Lauretta in 2008.
University of Arizona
Drake led the team with Lauretta serving as deputy principal investigator. But, when Drake died only months after mission selection, Lauretta – still an early-career scientist – stepped into Drake's shoes. Ever since, he has seen the team through each of its successes.
Drake and Lauretta designed OSIRIS-REx to reveal mysteries about the formation and evolution of the solar system, the origins for the ingredients of life and to inform planetary defense. They selected Bennu – an asteroid slightly wider than the height of the Empire State Building – as the target asteroid for three reasons: the near-Earth asteroid was accessible and had a small chance of impacting the Earth late in the 22nd century, it spins at a rate reasonable enough to approach by spacecraft, and is rich in organic material, the building blocks of life as we know it.
Such lofty goals required the power of precision instruments. These include a suite of three cameras developed by the U of A, called OCAMS, which were designed to support the mission through all of its phases; spectrometers that provide light, mineral and temperature information; the Touch-And-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism to gather the pieces of Bennu; and the Sample Return Capsule, outfitted with a heat shield and parachutes to deliver the sample safely to Earth.
By the time it was completed, OSIRIS-REx measured 20 feet long with its solar panels deployed and about 8 feet wide, about the size of a 15-passenger van, and weighed 4,650 pounds with fuel.
Getting to know Bennu
The spacecraft launched from Cape Canaveral aboard an Atlas V rocket on Sept. 8, 2016.
An Atlas V rocket lifts off from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station carrying NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft on the first U.S. mission to sample an asteroid and return it to Earth for study.
NASA/Sandy Joseph and Tim Terry
At the start of its two-year journey, Bennu was still just a point of light in a telescope, but based on analysis of its reflected light, the science team predicted it would be shaped like a spinning top and have a surface coated in beach-like sand.
Upon arrival on Dec. 3, 2018, the team learned they had accurately predicted the asteroid's shape, but Bennu held two major surprises: First, rather than sand, it was an amalgamation of rocks and boulders. This posed a significant challenge because the spacecraft was specifically designed to capture dust and small rocks. Second, it was flinging material into space. After closer investigation, the team found that most of the ejected material fell back onto the asteroid and the likelihood of debris striking the spacecraft was minimal.
For 18 months, OSIRIS-REx circled its target to survey its surface.
Guinness World Records recognized the mission for two record-breaking accomplishments: The spacecraft made the closest orbit of a planetary body and made the asteroid the smallest planetary object ever orbited by a spacecraft.
But such maneuvers were not just for impressive feats of agility, OSIRIS-REx was capturing very fine resolution images – down to 3 millimeters per pixel at some locations – to create a 3D map and identify a sample site, if one could be found among its rough and rugged terrain.
"Our expectations about the asteroid's surface were completely wrong," Lauretta said. "There was no obvious place to collect a sample anywhere."
In December 2019, the mission homed in on Hokioi Crater as the primary sample collection site, dubbing it "Nightingale." According to Lauretta, it contained the greatest amount of fine-grained material and – compared to other potential sites – it was relatively accessible.
Well before any rocks sat under a microscope, the science team was publishing science results. They discovered that the asteroid was covered in organic material and that the rocky debris covering the Nightingale sample site had only recently been exposed, both findings ensured that the sample contained some of the most pristine material available.
Touching an asteroid
Only months before the spacecraft was scheduled to execute the precarious task of sample collection, the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the globe.
But, on Oct. 20, 2020, right on schedule, the spacecraft unfurled its Touch and Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism, TAGSAM for short, to briefly touch the asteroid's surface. It captured gravel and dust so loosely bound that the spacecraft momentarily dipped into the asteroid, like a child jumping in a ball pit, before firing its thrusters to escape.
An illustration showing how the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft impact asteroid Bennu's surface when it touched down and collected a sample.
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab
While this moment was scary, it provided valuable information. Bennu's surface acted more like a fluid than a solid. It's possible that asteroids like Bennu, barely held together by gravity or electrostatic force, could break apart in Earth's atmosphere and pose a different type of hazard than solid asteroids.
The drama didn't end there. Not long after sample collection, the team realized that rocks were propping open the mylar flap, causing the spacecraft to leak what precious material it had collected.
Their response was quick and definitive. They paused the spin maneuver designed to reveal the sample mass and instead deposited the TAGSAM head, which held the material, directly in the into the Sample Return Capsule. Eight days after TAG, the mission successfully stowed the sample.
On May 10, 2021, the spacecraft fired its main engines at full throttle for seven minutes to begin its return cruise.
The more than two-year trip home provided ample time for science. In August 2021, the team published findings based on Bennu tracking data. They found that the asteroid has an increased risk of impacting Earth than thought. This work also improved our ability to predict orbits of many other asteroids.
They also found that Bennu's impact probability through the year 2300 to be about 1 in 1,750 and identified Sept. 24, 2182 as the most significant single date, with an impact probability of 1 in 2,700. Although the chances of hitting Earth are low, Bennu is still one of the most hazardous known objects in the solar system.
Homecoming
On the morning of Sept. 24, 2023, after seven years in space and 4 billion miles traveled, the spacecraft deployed the Sample Return Capsule for delivery to the Utah desert. As it plunged through the atmosphere, the team realized something wasn't right. In a nail-biting turn of events, one parachute did not deploy. Luckily, the main chute did, and within several minutes, the recovery team was dispatched to the landing site. They found the capsule blackened from reentry, but otherwise in good shape.
From left to right, NASA sample return capsule science lead Scott Sandford, NASA astromaterials curator Francis McCubbin and U of A's OSIRIS-REx principal investigator Dante Lauretta, collect science data shortly after the sample return capsule landed in the Utah desert.
NASA/Keegan Barber
"It was like seeing an old friend that you hadn't seen for a long time," Lauretta said during a post-landing press conference hosted by NASA.
The sample was handled with extreme care from reentry to opening, ensuring that the sample remain as pristine as possible.
Back in space, only twenty minutes after dropping the sample high above Earth's atmosphere, the spacecraft fired its thrusters to put it on course to rendezvous with Apophis in five-and-a-half years – just after that asteroid makes its own close approach to Earth.
The start of science
On Sept. 26, 2023, the capsule was opened for the first time. Only a few weeks later, NASA announced that from preliminary results, they found significant quantities of carbon-based compounds and hydrated minerals, supporting hypotheses about the potential role of asteroids in bringing essential components for life to early Earth.
A few days after that, the mission was able to confirm that they successfully acquired 121.6 grams, or 4.3 ounces, of sample, more than twice mission requirements. By December NASA began distributing pieces of Bennu, and sample science began at the U of A. Here, scientists are able to probe the samples, down to a single atom.
Lauretta has often said that decades of research will come from this mission, but so much has already been gleaned from this immense effort.
The asteroid Bennu up close. The surface was covered in rocks and boulders, surprisingly.
NASA/University of Arizona/CSA/York University/MDA
For example, Bennu was surprisingly craggy because of the highly porous nature of its rocks. Impacts weren't fragmenting Bennu's rocks like they expected. Rather, impacts were compressing the pores within the rocks. What's more, it was these pores, in addition to unexpected cracks only detected once samples were Earth-bound, that hoodwinked scientists into mistakenly inferring that that Bennu would be sandy. This is because sandy material heats up and cools down rapidly, such like Bennu seemed to be doing.
They also discovered that Bennu originated from a larger parent asteroid that broke up after a collision, likely from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The parent asteroid consisted of material with diverse origins – near the sun, far from the sun and from the stardust that existed even before the sun. This all coalesced more than 4 billion years ago as our solar system was forming.
Life's building blocks
They also learned that the parent body was also likely water-rich.
"Fluids altered rock at low temperatures and later evolved into concentrated brines that precipitated carbonates, phosphates, sulfates, chlorides, fluorides and other secondary minerals," Lauretta said. "Individual Bennu stones record different alteration histories, showing how heterogeneous those processes were even over centimeter scales."
This finding also provocatively suggests that the building blocks of life were widely distributed across the solar system, delivered to Earth by asteroids like this. And these findings are only beginning to scratch the surface of Drake's initial, provocative questions that launched this daring mission.
At mission's end, the science team has published more than 200 research papers, and this is only the beginning.
"Most of the Bennu material will remain in curation for future generations, to be studied with questions and instruments we cannot yet anticipate," Lauretta said.
Now the spacecraft flies on. Not only has it been reincarnated as OSIRIS-APEX, which is on its way to study another near-Earth asteroid, Apophis, but many of the early-career scientists and students who worked on OSIRIS-REx are leading the APEX team into the next generation of scientific discovery.
Dante Lauretta Victory Speech - YouTube
UA News - Tenacity, Triumph and Discovery: Looking Back at OSIRIS-REx at Mission's End
Discovery Marks the First Detection of Variable Water Clouds Outside of Our Solar System
A Jupiter-sized world just 7.5 light-years away is cloudy, chemically complex, and, it turns out, more like home than anyone expected.Discovery Marks the First Detection of Variable Water Clouds Outside of Our Solar System
By Hannah Hindley, Steward Observatory - October 8, 2026
A Jupiter-sized world just 7.5 light-years away is cloudy, chemically complex, and, it turns out, more like home than anyone expected.
Using the James Webb Space Telescope, Brittany Miles, assistant astronomer at University of Arizona Steward Observatory, led a team that spent 11 hours staring at WISE 0855, the coldest known brown dwarf, collecting a spectrum of its light every 15 minutes. The result is the most detailed time-series portrait ever taken of this frigid world – and the first direct confirmation that water clouds on another body are changing thickness over time, just like weather on Earth.
The study, published in The Astrophysical Journal, reveals that WISE 0855's atmosphere is shaped by at least two distinct processes playing out simultaneously: water clouds at high altitudes that grow thicker and thinner as the object rotates, and deep chemical gases being dredged upward by convection from far below. Untangling those two signals – previously impossible with older telescopes – is what makes JWST data so powerful.
"This is the first time we've been able to confirm that water clouds are becoming thinner and thicker on a nearby world," said Miles, a postdoctoral researcher at Steward Observatory. "Before JWST, we only had photometry, which mixed up the effects of clouds, chemistry, and temperature all together. Now we can actually distinguish them."
Brown dwarfs occupy a strange middle ground. Too massive to be planets, too small to ignite as stars, they glow dimly with leftover heat from their formation. WISE 0855, at roughly 265 Kelvin – colder than Earth's surface – sits at the very bottom of that category, blurring the line further. At about twice Jupiter's mass and nearly the same size, it looks and behaves, in many ways, like a free-floating giant planet.
Understanding its atmosphere requires looking at the world through what co-author Mark Marley, director and department head of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at U of A, describes as a kind of screen door. "The photons go through the atmosphere and escape to space," Marley said. "It's like looking at the world through a screen door, where the screen is filtering out some of the light. We're learning about the world on either side of the screen – but we also have to understand the screen itself."
In this case, the screen keeps changing. As WISE 0855 rotates, different patches of its surface rotate into view, each with slightly different cloud cover and temperature, like watching a slowly turning patchwork of warmer and cooler regions. JWST's medium-resolution spectrograph was sensitive enough to track those differences across individual molecular features – something no prior observatory could achieve for an object this cold. In addition to the variable temperatures that followed the rotation of the brown dwarf, the spectrograph also captured a rhythmic, wave-like signal tied to specific gases: carbon monoxide and phosphine. Those chemicals fluctuate because heat from deep inside the brown dwarf is constantly churning them upward toward the surface, the same way a pot of hot soup pushes warmer liquid up from the bottom.
This kind of chemical signal is familiar to planetary scientists. On Jupiter, convective mixing dredges gases from deep, hot layers up into the visible atmosphere. The same process, called disequilibrium chemistry, has been observed in brown dwarfs before – but watching it vary in real time, molecule by molecule, is new territory.
"We're seeing water clouds getting thicker and thinner, and deep gases rising and falling, and we can actually watch them change in real time," Miles said.
Miles says that the real value of this discovery isn't just what it tells us about WISE 0855 specifically, but what it suggests about planetary atmospheres more broadly. The basic physics of convection, clouds and chemistry that governs Jupiter also govern this cold, free-floating world more than seven light-years away. If that physics is universal, it applies to the gas giant exoplanets that astronomers are now beginning to study in earnest with JWST.
"Even though brown dwarfs are not true planets, they exhibit planet-like behavior," Miles said. "There is a spectrum of behaviors – not a hard line between brown dwarfs and planets. Jupiter and this object look distinctly different, but they have similar weather patterns. There are basic physics and chemistry that can be applied across all of these worlds."
For Miles, whose models were built on foundational work by theorists like Marley – whose atmospheric models were themselves benchmarked against Jupiter – the paper is as much a generational milestone as it is a discovery. "A lot of my physical intuition on what is missing from the models is because of Mark's mentorship and hard work," she said. "This is a multi-year project. A lot of people contributed to make sure this could be done right."
Miles looks ahead to logging more hours of baseline observations with JWST to pin down further details about WISE 0855's rotation and the three-dimensional nuances of its atmospheric movement. For now, the message is clear: weather happens everywhere, and some of our closest neighbors have skies worth watching.
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Soft and Stretchy or Rock Solid? New Modeling Study Sheds Light on How the Earth Got Its Moon
Historically, computer simulations modeling collisions between protoplanetary bodies have treated them largely as fluids. A new study suggests taking into account the material strength of solid bodies drastically changes outcomes.Soft and Stretchy or Rock Solid? New Modeling Study Sheds Light on How the Earth Got Its Moon
By Deb Schmid, SwRI, and Daniel Stolte, University Communications - September 8, 2026
For its size and location in the solar system, Earth has a surprisingly large moon. But how exactly the blue planet got its companion has vexed researchers for a long time. Researchers at the Southwest Research Institute and the University of Arizona used state-of-the-art computational techniques that revealed fundamental differences in how the moon may have formed from the collision between a Mars-sized object and Earth roughly 4.5 billion years ago.
Published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, the results – for the first time – factor in the material strength of the two ancestral bodies and may change how researchers think the planetary collision happened. These impact simulations could change how researchers understand moon formation and may help constrain the timing of the event.
"We discovered that the preexisting geology of the Mars-sized proto-moon matters," said Adeene Denton, a former postdoctoral researcher at Lunar and Planetary Laboratory who is now at SwRI. "When you simulate the Earth and the moon as colliding bodies with geologic properties, it changes how the moon forms out of that impact – that's something we considered unnecessary before."
New modeling that accounts for material strength revealed fundamental changes in how the moon forms after a giant collision between a Mars-sized impactor and Earth. Simulations that neglect strength (top) produce a debris disk that forms the moon over time while those factoring in strength (bottom) can produce an intact moon right from the start. - Courtesy of SwRI
Earlier studies of the giant impact scenario include a foundational 2001 paper by Robin Canup, vice president of SwRI’s Solar System Science and Exploration Division in Boulder, Colorado, and Erik Asphaug, a professor at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory and co-author of the current study. In the giant impact scenario, the debris from the collision of a Mars-sized body known as Theia with the early Earth obliterated Theia, scattering its remains into a disk around Earth. However, those simulations and subsequent giant impact modeling ignored material strength, which was thought to be insignificant for such high-energy events. Denton and her team revisited this hypothesis, using modern computational methods that incorporate temperature-dependent geologic strength for the first time.
"Because the collision was considered violent enough to melt and vaporize large portions of Earth and Theia, those previous papers assumed that it is okay to approximate them as fluids," Asphaug said. "Based on our new results, however, we think that it is time to reconsider that."
Denton revisited the hypothesis, for the first time using more advanced smoothed particle hydrodynamics simulations, or SPH, that take into account the structural strength of the bodies involved in the collision.
"It turns out material strength is really important when you're studying collisions between smaller bodies like asteroids, dwarf planets and moons," said Denton, who got the idea of applying the concept to Earth's moon while working on a previous paper about the formation of the Pluto-Charon system. "We weren’t sure if it would matter for our moon or not. When we did the simulations, we found it actually matters quite a bit."
This version of SPH, developed at the U of A and the University of Bern in Switzerland, uses a strength model that gives the bodies the kind of resistance to deformation that is expected for realistic geologic materials such as the rock and metals that would have made up Theia and the proto-Earth, or solid ice.
Hotter bodies are weaker than colder ones, and the team found that the different outcomes of Moon formation scenarios are sensitive to the temperatures of the colliding bodies. Some scenarios produce a fully intact moon within hours of the impact, while others result in a protolunar disk around the Earth that ultimately forms the moon over time. Because protoplanets generally start off hot and cool with age, this establishes an important new connection between the timing of the giant impact and the nature of the moon's initial state and assembly.
"Depending on how hot the Earth and moon are prior to the collision, the impact can destroy Theia and produce this massive disk of debris that eventually forms the moon," Denton said. "But when we used the same parameters as original impact modeling – down to the equal temperature structures inside both bodies – within around five hours, an intact moon emerged."
While intact moon outcomes have been seen in prior simulations, this work is the first to show that material strength and temperature play a central role in whether the moon forms intact or is assembled from material processed within a protolunar disk.
"These surprising and exciting new results imply a potential connection between the physical properties of the moon today, including perhaps its volatile content, and the thermal state of the Earth and Theia at the time of the giant impact," said Canup, who was not involved in the study. "This in turn might help scientists better constrain when the moon-forming event occurred."
The other conundrum remains the similarity of materials making up the Earth and the moon. As with prior models, explaining the close compositional makeup of the Earth and Moon remains an open scientific question.
"Because Earth and Mars formed in the same neighborhood of the solar system, they are like siblings," Denton said. "The moon and Earth are more like fraternal twins."
A possible explanation is that Theia and the proto-Earth formed from a common region of the solar system, while Mars, which is compositionally distinct from the Earth and Moon, formed farther away.
"We now know that the geophysical state of Earth and Theia play a fundamental role in shaping the outcome of the collision," said study co-author Namya Baijal, a doctoral student in Asphaug's group. "This gives us a new way to explore the conditions of the impact and what they might reveal about the moon's origin."
UA News - Soft and Stretchy or Rock Solid? New Modeling Study Sheds Light on How the Earth Got Its Moon
Pandora Mission Begins Science Operations
Few space missions are run from university campuses. NASA's Pandora space has embarked on its mission to stare at worlds outside of our solar system and their host stars, all under the watchful eyes of a dedicated team at the U of A's own mission control center.Pandora Mission Begins Science Operations
By NASA and Daniel Stolte, University Communications - August 25, 2026
Seven months after launch, Pandora has officially begun its mission: to catch never-before-seen glimpses of worlds beyond our solar system and the stars they orbit. A team of engineers at the University of Arizona worked hard to prepare Pandora for its science mission, and the work of a team of U of A scientists is now kicking into high gear.
Pandora, NASA's newest exoplanet mission, will determine the atmospheric make-up of at least 20 exoplanets, including the presence of hazes, clouds and water. The U of A leads mission operations for Pandora, which is led by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, and contributes to its science program under joint leadership of Daniel Apai, a professor for astronomy and planetary sciences at the U of A Steward Observatory and Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, and Nic Altamirano, Pandora's MMOC manager and mission operations project manager. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory provides the mission's project management and engineering.
The first space telescope built specifically for detailed multi-color observations of starlight as it passes through the atmospheres of exoplanets, Pandora will study planets and their host stars simultaneously in both visible and infrared light. By staring at targets for a much longer time than flagship observatories like NASA's James Webb Space Telescope can, Pandora will help interpret data both from ongoing missions – such as Webb – and previous missions like NASA's Kepler Space Telescope.
"This is a big moment for our Pandora science team members here on campus," said Apai, who leads the Pandora Exoplanet Science Working group. "Our U of A team, including astronomy students and early-career researchers, are taking their first looks at the atmospheres of worlds and their suns that have never been studied in such details before."
The Pandora satellite consists of a telescope with an 18-inch, all-aluminum mirror and instrumentation that allows it to analyze light spectra and measure brightness to an extreme level of accuracy. Light spectra are like signatures that provide scientists with information about the chemical makeup of a star and the atmosphere of a planet that orbits it, while subtle dips in brightness are tell-tale signs that a planet is crossing in front of its star as seen from the observer.
Pandora is the first on-orbit NASA mission to be managed from the U of A's Multi-Mission Operation Center, or MMOC, which is part of the Arizona Space Institute. Entering "steady-state operations" marks an exciting milestone for the mission, according to Altamirano.
"We have assembled a strong team of mission operation professionals and students who are equipped to support Pandora's day-to-day operations, providing the experience and operational maturity needed to sustain the mission moving forward," Altamirano said.
To turn the science calendar into executable spacecraft command sequences, U of A's MMOC works closely with the Science Operations Center at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and the Data Processing Center at NASA Ames Research Center.
"This involves taking planned observations and science activities, building the appropriate commands, validating them through our operational processes and coordinating with the SOC to ensure the final sequences are ready for uplink and execution," Altamirano explained.
While many routine activities are automated, mission operations still require hands-on oversight and manual intervention when needed to respond to spacecraft state, operational constraints, anomalies or changes to the plan.
"Pandora is entering the most exciting phase of its journey: the science is beginning," said Tomás Díaz de la Rubia, senior vice president for research and partnerships. "I had the privilege of being there for the launch, and now our researchers and students are beginning to study the atmospheres of worlds beyond our solar system. From our deep strengths in astronomy, planetary science and astrobiology to the mission operations expertise of our Multi-Mission Operation Center, the University of Arizona brings together the capabilities needed to help us better understand distant worlds and, ultimately, the conditions that could support life beyond Earth."
Telescopes can sample a planet's atmosphere in systems where the planet passes in front of its star as seen from our perspective. During this event, called a transit, some starlight skims the planet's atmosphere before making its way to us. As this light interacts with atmospheric molecules, their chemical fingerprints become embedded in it. For each molecule, astronomers see brightness dips at characteristic wavelengths.
But Pandora's instruments also see light from the whole star, not just what grazes the planet. Stellar surfaces aren't uniform. They sport hotter, brighter areas called faculae and cooler, darker regions similar to sunspots. Both can grow, shrink, and change position as the star rotates.
"Water is one of the most important molecules we can measure to understand the composition and physical conditions of an exoplanet atmosphere," said Benjamin Rackham, who obtained his doctoral degree in Apai's research group and is now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "But features on the star can distort the water signal we're searching for. Pandora is designed to disentangle the signals from the planet and the star, helping us to understand the planets more accurately and laying the groundwork for the eventual study of planets that could harbor life."
Over the course of its year-long primary mission, Pandora will observe at least 20 exoplanets 10 times with a long-duration stare covering 24 hours, with a transit included in each observation.
UA News - Pandora Mission Begins Science Operations
U of A Scientists Play Crucial Roles in Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Science
The Launch of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope takes place live Sunday on NASA Live.U of A Scientists Play Crucial Roles in Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Science
By Mikayla Mace Kelley, University Communications - August 27, 2026
It is T-minus 4 days until lift off for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, NASA's next flagship astrophysics mission after the James Webb Space Telescope. Several University of Arizona faculty and students will be watching the launch from Cape Canaveral in anticipation of the start of science activities, slated to begin in January 2027.
Watch the launch live Sunday morning at 7:26 am EDT/4:26 am MST on NASA Live.
While Webb was designed to see far, Roman will see wide, conducting rapid surveys of huge swaths of night sky. Both telescopes, however, can collect infrared light, allowing astronomers to cross reference their data. These flagship telescopes, working alongside each other, will reveal more about the universe than either alone.
Roman's primary mirror, at 7.9-feet across, is the same size as Hubble Space Telescope's and carries two instruments. The Coronagraph Instrument will reveal exoplanets and disks around other stars by blocking and filtering starlight. The Wide Field Instrument was made to be as sensitive as Hubble's cameras but will image an area 100 times larger. While Hubble has observed roughly 0.1% of the night sky over its 30-year mission, Roman has the potential to cover the entire sky at the same resolution.
Roman will detect rare objects both near and far, and capture images of dying stars, new worlds, galaxy clusters and more. The U of A will play various roles in Roman Telescope science.
New techniques in cosmology
One of Roman's central objectives is to probe cosmological mysteries related to dark matter and dark energy, enigmatic influences that make up nearly all the universe. Dark matter is a substance with gravitational influence but doesn't emit light. Dark energy, somehow, drives the accelerated expansion of the universe.
NASA selected the U of A's Arizona Cosmology Lab to support two investigations into the properties and mechanics of these mysteries – one in the wide-field science team and one in project infrastructure team category.
Elisabeth Krause, professor of astronomy and physics, leads the wide-field science team "Kinematic Lensing with the Roman Space Telescope," which was awarded $2 million to develop a new type of cosmological measurement called kinematic lensing. By combining images with spectroscopic data, the team will study dark matter and dark energy with more precision than ever before.
The U of A-based group of the project infrastructure team "Maximizing Cosmological Science with the Roman High Latitude Imaging Survey" will play a leading role within a multi-institutional effort. Tim Eifler, professor of astronomy and physics, is leading the working group that will interpret the cosmological data.
Astronomers will use the Roman Telescope to detect galaxies near and far, pinpoint their location and measure their particular characteristics to create a catalog. Then, they'll run models based on the catalog to help them understand the underlying physical properties of the universe.
In order to perform the complex calculations that underpin these physical models, the NASA Roman Project awarded Eifler's lab $800,000 to buy computing resources that will be part of a new university-wide high-performance computing system slated to arrive this fall and an additional $2.4 million over five years to do the science.
"This infrastructure will take us from catalogs to cosmological interpretation." Eifler said. "We'll be able to do things like determine how much dark energy and dark matter are in the universe."
Eifler is also the co-chair of the cosmology group, a collection of over 1,000 scientists from around the world.
"It's fantastic to rally the community and to organize us around this science case," he said. "This really is a dream job."
Planetary pursuit
Roman's Coronagraphic Instrument will wield a collection of masks, prisms, detectors, filters and self-flexing mirrors to demonstrate new technologies for blocking the light of other stars and directly imaging the planets and disks that surround them.
Being able to directly image planets is a gamechanger. Nearly all exoplanets have been found using indirect methods, such as measuring the dip in starlight when a planet passes in front of it. But blocking glare allows scientists to discover more elusive planets than before. In fact, the instrument will be able to see planets 100 million times fainter than their stars – 100 to 1,000 times better than existing space-based coronagraphs.
"It will be a crucial pathfinder for a future Habitable Worlds Observatory," a recommended telescope that would be specifically designed to search for signs of life in other solar systems, said Schuyler Wolff, an associate research professor of astronomy leading the observation planning working group for the Coronagraph Instrument.
Lunar and Planetary Laboratory director Mark Marley, associate professor of astronomy Ewan S. Douglas, Steward Observatory assistant research professor Ramya Anche, and astronomy postdoctoral research associate Justin Hom all also played roles in developing this instrument and will conduct future science as part of the observation planning working group.
Marley, along with LPL associate professor Ty Robinson and LPL postdoctoral research associate Zarah Brown, will use data from the Coronagraph Instrument to understand atmospheres the of other worlds.
Brown has been modeling the climate and spectra of self-luminous giant planets, which are typically so young and hot that they emit thermal infrared light. The model predicts not just the atmosphere's temperature, composition and clouds, but the spectrum of infrared light the object should give off; a prediction the team needs because most of these objects have never been observed at these wavelengths before.
"That predicted spectrum is critical for planning," Brown said. "Roman's coronagraph is working with extremely faint, high-contrast targets, so the team has to schedule enough observing time to detect a candidate without burning more of the mission's limited time than necessary."
Anche's team is studying the structure of extrasolar-systems, and Hom is leading efforts to select the best stars to calibrate the Coronagraph Instrument. Hom also leads the precursor observation programs using ground-based telescopes, critical for validating target selection for future science programs.
The start of science
Once science operations begin in January, data will be made available to the science community. The U of A will lead nine NASA-approved investigations using this data that will bring in more than $2 million. Our researchers will probe additional subjects such as supermassive black holes, gravitational lenses, galaxy formation, reionization and cosmic dust.
UA News - U of A Scientists Play Crucial Roles in Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Science
Planet Formation is a 'Race Against Time,' According to New U of A Research
"Stunning" JWST images of newborn-solar systems shed light on how and when they lose gas, suggesting that planet formation is "a race against time," according to new research led by U of A graduate student Naman Bajaj.Planet Formation is a 'Race Against Time,' According to New U of A Research
By Mikayla Mace Kelley, University Communcations - August 25, 2026
The solar system today – at a mature 4.5 billion years of age – is mostly empty space sprinkled with a few planets, asteroids and comets. But in the first few million years of the solar system's life, it was a thick, swirling mass that contained 100 times more gas than dust.
To better understand how and when such vast amounts of gas vanished from our solar system disk and others like it, University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory doctoral student Naman Bajaj dug into archival data from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope.
In one of the largest studies in planet formation conducted using JWST, this work supports past research that shows the existence of two physical mechanisms working in succession in the first 10 million years of a solar system's life. This study also constrains when the transition between dominating mechanisms occurs.
A real image of disk winds carrying out molecular hydrogen gas from a planet-forming disk located about 450 light-years from us. The white line is the plane of the planet-forming disk, while the bright yellow, orange, pink and purple represent ejected gas. - Naman Bajaj/JWST/MIRI-IFU
Bajaj and his team published their findings today in the Astronomical Journal.
It starts with a newborn star ringed by a dense protoplanetary disk, which hosts its own huge magnetic field. Gas from the disk hitches a ride along magnetic field lines. They are funneled up and out from the solar system's navel at 10-100 miles per second. This outflowing gas is called the "magnetic winds," and it is so massive that it blocks all the X-ray photons, which is high-energy light, from reaching the disk.
But, after a few million years, the magnetic winds weaken. At this point, what's known as 'photoevaporative winds' likely become the dominating force, this study suggests. Composed of energetic X-rays and ultraviolet light from the sun, the photoevaporative wind penetrates the magnetic winds, excites the gas in the disk and expels it from the system. Bajaj likes to compare this to how the energy from the sun heats water on Earth and evaporates it.
"After a few million years, the jets disappear and the molecular winds fade, leaving behind only gentler atomic winds that quietly erode what remains," Bajaj said. "This means that every planetary system with a sun-like star, including our own, likely underwent a vigorous phase of magnetic wind-driven mass loss early in its history, before transitioning to a calmer dispersal phase.
"Planet formation is therefore a race against time," he said. "Gas giants like Jupiter must assemble their massive atmospheres while the disk is still substantial enough to supply them, before winds and jets carry that raw material away into space."
The results were based on 72 images of young sun-like stars and their surrounding disks. Each image captured a system at a different stage of life, so when the images were stitched together like stills from a movie, it created a timeline of how planetary systems lose the raw material to build planets.
Data from each system allowed the team to trace the movement of two specific gases: molecular hydrogen, which is two bonded hydrogen atoms, and neon gas that has been ionized, or electrically charged.
They focused on molecular hydrogen because it makes up most of the mass in the universe, and past U of A-led research showed it traces molecular winds. Neon, on the other hand, can only be observed by Webb's midinfrared detectors when it's ionized, meaning it's excited by high-energy radiation in the photoevaporative wind.
"Neon initially traces the fast-moving jets while molecular hydrogen is tracing wider winds. Later, we see neon in the slower, broader motion of the photoevaporative wind when the magnetic jets and winds weaken, and the X-ray photons can excite neon," said Bajaj. "During this phase, molecular hydrogen seems to trace weaker winds or nothing at all."
In 2020, LPL professor Ilaria Pascucci, second author of the paper and Bajaj's advisor, led a team that conducted a similar study to understand how jets and winds evolve. At that time, pre-JWST, they couldn't observe molecular hydrogen directly, but they predicted the existence of molecular winds and that these winds could be massive enough to block X-ray photons at earlier ages. With this new study, by tracing molecular hydrogen directly, Bajaj's team also confirmed these predictions with the JWST images.
Reflecting on the images, what surprised Bajaj most was just how beautiful they were.
"I mean, we expected the images to be nice, we didn't expect them to be absolutely stunning," he said.
Next, the team hopes to more thoroughly constrain how much gas mass is lost over time. Bajaj also wants to pin down exactly at what distance from the star the gas launches from the disk, which is important for understanding at what distance certain planets can form.
Additional co-authors include Sylvie Cabrit of Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Smith College's Suzan Edwards, University of Zurich's Gabriele Cugno, Leiden University's Andrew Sellek, NSF NOIRLab's Joan Najita, University of Wisconsin-Madison's Ke Zhang, University of Leicester's Richard Alexander, Peking University's Gregory Herczeg, Uma Gorti of SETI Institute and NASA, U of A's Sophie Clark and Space Telescope Science Institute's Tracy Beck.
A mosaic of the James Webb Space Telescope images used in this study. Each of these images is about 750 astronomical units, or AU, wide and tall. For context, one AU is the average Earth-Sun distance. - Bajaj et al. 2026
UA News - Planet Formation is a 'Race Against Time,' According to New U of A Research
U of A Begins Building Moon-bound EMILIA-3D to Study Lunar Terrain
The LPL-led EMILIA-3D is one of three recent science investigation payloads selected through NASA's PRISM SALSA program to study the lunar surface.U of A Begins Building Moon-bound EMILIA-3D to Study Lunar Terrain
By Mikayla Mace Kelley, University Communications - August 19, 2026
The University of Arizona has begun building EMILIA-3D, one of three science investigation payloads selected by NASA earlier this year to be delivered to the moon by a future Commercial Lunar Payload Services, or CLPS, lander.
Short for EMission Imager for Lunar Infrared Analysis in 3D, the three-sensor package was selected under the Payloads and Research Investigations on the Surface of the Moon: Stand-Alone Landing Site-Agnostic, or PRISM SALSA, program.
It will allow scientists to study the interplay between lighting conditions, small-scale topography and temperature to create three-dimensional thermal models of the dusty lunar soil, called regolith. Ultimately, this can help the U.S. better image and navigate the moon's surface.
EMILIA-3D includes the Stereo Visible Imaging System, SVIS, and the Thermal Infrared Imager, TIR.
SVIS will provide stereovision with two eye-like cameras, while TIR captures temperature data. Both are mounted on a gimbal, which will be built by Rocket Lab Robotics (Motiv). The gimbal will allow the sensors to scan the lunar surface from the bottom of the lander to the horizon every eight hours for two weeks, the equivalent of one sunrise to sunset on the slowly revolving moon. As the sun slowly pushes and pulls shadows across the land, the sensors will do their work.
Filling an important gap
"The stereo images will be combined with thermal measurements at the centimeter- to meter-scale to create a totally new dataset of the lunar surface. This will help fill an important gap in data, since most images of the lunar surface are taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which are comparatively low-resolution at this scale," said Sarah Sutton, EMILIA-3D principal investigator and photogrammetry program lead in the U of A Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. "Data returned by EMILIA-3D will feed into a sophisticated thermal model that shows how heat may transfer through the surface horizontally as well as vertically. Ours will be the first measurements of the lunar surface at this scale to support and improve 3D thermal models."
The team is specifically interested in temperature data in terms of small-scale surface structure, which can be quite craggy. Even the smallest of shadows can create a frigid environment that harbors volatiles, which are chemical compounds that vaporize at low temperatures, such as water ice on the moon. Also, because regolith doesn't conduct heat well, it warms up quickly in daylight but remains cold just beneath the surface, where volatiles may lurk.
"Understanding how human exploration affects volatiles, such as water, will be important before Artemis astronauts land at the lunar south pole," said Andy Ryan, a co-investigator and EMILIA-3D's science team lead. Ryan led the project proposal, which was supported in part by the Arizona Space Institute, when he was a U of A staff research scientist. Now, he's head of mining and payloads at AstroForge, a deep-space mining company. "Homing in on the correct physics will have important implications for where water ice could be stable and if human activity could destabilize it."
Beyond studying volatiles, heat flow through regolith can also reveal something about its physical properties, such as particle size and compaction in the near subsurface, giving insight into the geologic history of the surface.
Examining the effects of exploration
Another science objective is to observe how the thruster blast from the lander scours the surface and changes the thermal measurements from within that zone. This will shed light on the effects of exploration on the near-surface and inform the design of equipment, instruments and gear, according to the team.
The proposal required the payload be designed to achieve its science objectives from anywhere on the moon and from any lander.
The team now has 24 months to prepare the instrument for delivery to NASA. To reduce risk, the sensors will be derived from elements that have already demonstrated success on other missions, according to Sutton. For example, SVIS and TIR – EMILIA-3D's eyes – are based on Northern Arizona University's VISIONS instrument, short for VISible and Infrared ObservatioN System, which is currently on its way to Mars on NASA's ESCAPADE mission.
"VISIONS proved that NAU can design and build what we call science-grade cameras – instruments that combine off-the-shelf and custom parts engineered to survive the harsh conditions of space," said Chris Haberle of NAU, EMILIA-3D's deputy principal investigator and camera instrument scientist. "With EMILIA-3D, we're taking that same approach from a Mars mission to the surface of the Moon."
There's also support from the Technology and Research Initiative Fund – or TRIF, a state fund to drive innovation and economic development at universities – to build a thermally controlled vacuum chamber. This chamber is distinct because it will be filled with mirrors to view to the simulated lunar surface at different angles much like EMILIA-3D will. These lab measurements will aid in interpretation of actual lunar surface data. This effort is led by U of A LPL researcher Michael Phillips.
"EMILIA-3D is an exciting opportunity to perform infrared stereo imaging to study the moon's surface in a new way," said LPL associate professor Dani DellaGiustina, who is serving as a project scientist. Along with experience on other missions, she served as deputy principal investigator for OSIRIS-REx and now leads OSIRIS-APEX. "My role is to help the team connect the science goals to the practical realities of building and operating a NASA instrument, drawing on lessons learned from our Artemis LEMS seismometers, OSIRIS-REx, OSIRIS-APEX and other planetary missions. Sarah has a really strong team, and I'm excited to support her leadership and help ensure EMILIA-3D is positioned for success."
Other team members include U of A's Carina Bennett and Cameron Dickinson, Kenneth Edmundson of Edmundson Photogrammetry, NAU's Christopher Edwards and Kristen Bennett, University of Hawai'i, Manoa's Matthew Siegler, University of Central Florida's Phil Metzger, U.S. Geological Survey's Randolph Kirk, Colorado University, Boulder's Paul Hayne, and Mines Paris-PSL's Daniel Pino Muñoz and Marc Bernacki.
UA News - U of A Begins Building Moon-bound EMILIA-3D to Study Lunar Terrain