“The asteroid Bennu continues to provide new clues to scientists’ biggest questions about the formation of the early solar system and the origins of life. As part of the ongoing study of pristine samples delivered to Earth by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security-Regolith Explorer) spacecraft, three new papers published Tuesday by the journals Nature Geosciences and Nature Astronomy present remarkable discoveries: sugars essential for biology, a gum-like substance not seen before in astromaterials, and an unexpectedly high abundance of dust produced by supernova explosions.

Scientists led by Yoshihiro Furukawa of Tohoku University in Japan found sugars essential for biology on Earth in the Bennu samples, detailing their findings in the journal Nature Geoscience. The five-carbon sugar ribose and, for the first time in an extraterrestrial sample, six-carbon glucose were found. Although these sugars are not evidence of life, their detection, along with previous detections of amino acids, nucleobases, and carboxylic acids in Bennu samples, show building blocks of biological molecules were widespread throughout the solar system.”

From NASA.

“Scientists may have ‘seen’ dark matter for the first time, thanks to NASA’s Fermi gamma-ray space telescope. If so, this would mark the first direct detection of the universe’s most mysterious substance…

A team of researchers, led by Tomonori Totani from the Department of Astronomy at the University of Tokyo, trained the Fermi spacecraft on the regions of the Milky Way where dark matter should congregate, namely at the center of our galaxy, and hunted for this telltale gamma-ray signature.

Well, Totani thinks we finally found that signature.

‘We detected gamma rays with a photon energy of 20 gigaelectronvolts (or 20 billion electronvolts, an extremely large amount of energy) extending in a halolike structure toward the center of the Milky Way galaxy,’ Totani said. ‘The gamma-ray emission component closely matches the shape expected from the dark matter halo.’

And this isn’t the only close match. The energy signature of these gamma-rays closely matches those predicted to emerge from the annihilation of colliding WIMPs, which are predicted to have a mass around 500 times that of a proton, the ordinary matter particles found at the heart of atoms. Totani suggests there aren’t any other astronomical phenomena that easily explain the gamma-rays observed by Fermi.”

From Space.com.

“On its second try, Blue Origin nailed the landing of its New Glenn rocket booster on Thursday.

A booster landing is not a novel feat. SpaceX, Elon Musk’s space company, accomplished it for the first time a decade ago with its Falcon 9 rocket, and it now performs it routinely, most recently on Monday night.

But no other company had pulled that off for an orbital-class rocket, until Blue Origin.

With two successful launches in a row, New Glenn could win a sizable slice of the business of sending stuff to space…

Thursday’s launch also accomplished its primary task: launching ESCAPADE, or Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers, a NASA mission that will head to Mars to measure the magnetic fields buffeting charged particles around that planet.

The two small identical spacecraft that comprise the mission, nicknamed Blue and Gold, were successfully deployed 33 minutes after launch. They will first loop around Lagrange-2, one of five points in space where the gravitational pull of the sun and Earth balance. Later in November, they will fire their engines in a maneuver that will use Earth’s gravity as a slingshot to send them on a trajectory to Mars.”

From New York Times.

“Aerospace startup Star Catcher Industries Inc., which is developing technology to beam solar power to orbiting satellites, said it wirelessly transmitted more electricity in a ground test than ever before, marking another step toward creating the equivalent of a space grid.

Using a suite of lasers, the company successfully sent energy to off-the-shelf solar panels positioned more than 1 kilometer (0.62 miles) away. The tests took place at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida last month.

The 1.1 kilowatt of converted electricity delivered at once exceeded the previous record set by the US government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa. During Star Catcher’s multiday campaign, it beamed more than 10 megajoules of energy, according to the company.”

From Bloomberg.