Smallest asteroid ever photographed up close, and WOW I've never seen anything like this before!! No obvious craters and very jagged shape. Just a single, 30-meter-long chunk of solid rock, unlike other asteroid visited by space probe.

So tiny, but yet not an obvious rubble pile. Very strange! A shard from a larger parent body, cast off from a massive impact perhaps?

Tianwen-2 had arrived. Here's asteroid Kamo'oalewa seen from 20 km away www.xinhuanet.com/20260706/eb8...

NASA & Katalyst Space are attempting to rescue the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, a powerful gamma-ray telescope that's on a death-spiral toward Earth. A booster spacecraft, called Link, is now on its way. It will attempt to grab Swift & lift it to safety. 🧪🔭 spacenews.com/pegasus-laun...

Travelers, there is light ahead

If you'd like to follow the Hayabusa2# flyby of asteroid Torifune today in real time 🛰️🔭, Otsuka Minoru has put together a real-time version of his flyby web app! He notes that nothing will appear on the screen until a few minutes before the flyby just before 18:30 JST but it's super cool. Link 👇

Incredible. They just asked everyone at the Boston Pops show to stand for a patriotic singalong and then started singing Neil Diamonds AMERICA, the most pro-immigrant anthem ever written. A+ no notes.

Reminder that sesquicentennial for the Statue of Liberty is in 10 years and is an excellent excuse to do a vastly improved celebration of what America can be. We got shit to look forward to folks.

Update from the Hayabusa2# team over on the bad place: 09:54 JST and optical navigation has begun. All is well.

A $3 @mta.info subway fare and some good Q train timing can buy you one hell of a view of the July 4th fireworks and the Brooklyn Bridge light show! Huge shoutout to the train operator for slow rolling over the Manhattan Bridge and the conductor for announcing it.

Climate information should be reliable, clear, and available to everyone. Climate.us is an independent nonprofit protecting public access to trusted, science-reviewed climate knowledge. Explore: www.climate.us 🌍🧪 #ClimateUS #ClimateForUs #ClimateScience #Science

Once I realized they were here, I started seeing them everywhere: tiny bits of life from the ancient shoreline that this mountain used to be. #FossilFriday

Good night

From NASA Charting the vast Jovian realm: NASA's Juno mission provides new maps of the giant planet Jupiter 🗺️ missionjuno.swri.edu/junocam/thin... This is a cylindrical composite map from Juno's 9th close pass by Jupiter. Credit: NASA / JPL / SwRI / MSSS / Gerald Eichstädt / John Rogers

GrabAGun

Italy's Mount Etna is putting on a spectacular display, with glowing lava lighting up the Sicilian night sky as volcanic activity ramps up and scientists monitor the potential for stronger eruptions. Watch more video: https://ow.ly/97xk50ZjMcM

Recent events got me wondering - what's the difference between GRIFT and GRAFT? So I looked it up. In case you were also wondering: GRIFT is a con, a swindle, a deception to get money GRAFT is corruption, abuse of power, to get money This is my public service of the day.

Pleasantly surprised, ngl.

THREAD. A collection of photographs of excellent horses and ponies I have met on my walks in the British countryside. You will find the vital biographical information for each horse or pony in the alt text.

We love bringing more space to your feed… but this time we need you. Jackie is part of our space image processing community and needs our support. Please read her story, share, and donate if you can. When the fundraiser reaches 1000, I’ll share a Mars dust storm I’ve never posted before ❤️ Thanks!

Process of Artemis II Eclipse Teapot (available tomorrow!)

"Day 139, orbit 2155 — 🤩 Watching this glowing green ribbon shimmer and dance, it's easy to lose yourself completely in the magic of the moment. Turn the sound on for the full experience 💚", says @esa.int astronaut Sophie Adenot. #εpsilon 🎥 ESA/NASA

#Saturn early Tuesday morning. Nice to see it again, and even nicer to have a bigger telescope to see it in. This is the best image I have captured of it, by far.

Run ads pointing out that 4 Justices of the United States Supreme Court would have disallowed this goal.

clocking into the longing factory where they pay me my yearnings

From NASA What's Up for July? A predawn meetup between the Moon and planets, a returning comet, dark skies for the Milky Way, and Saturn's unusually thin rings. youtu.be/z4KrIsRtqaE?...

Would you also like to admire the irregular shape of the moons of Mars? 🌚

New Martian landscapes and other beauties from @tthomopoulos.bsky.social and others at www.flickr.com/groups/ridin...

Full Moon Morning over Mount Rose Wilderness

🚨 Beyond the limit 🚨  New ESO study finds that current proposals to launch 1.7+ million satellites into orbit would have devastating consequences for astronomy. The most extreme proposals come from SpaceX & Reflect Orbital  🔭 🧪 ☄️ #DarkSkies #SatelliteConstellations 1/4

New distance measurements for our galaxy 📏 ESA's XMM-Newton & NASA's Chandra have measured the distance to three bright explosions echoing through the outer spiral arms of our galaxy. In doing so, they found the arms to be up to 10% further away than we thought 👉 www.esa.int/Science_Expl... 🔭 🧪 ☄️

I am not certain, but I think this might be the greatest thread (and greatest use of alt text) of all time.

NASA’s Curiosity Captures Martian Morning, Afternoon in New ‘Postcard’ - From NASA Marshall Space Flight Center - https://flic.kr/p/2oHiGaS

From NASA Finding asteroids before they find us! 🛘 Happy International Asteroid Day. NASA’s new NEO Surveyor mission is our next-generation near-Earth object hunter. science.nasa.gov/mission/neo-... 1/2

Justice Brown Jackson's argument for birthright citizenship is very moving. I recommend reading it in full. An excerpt with alt-text below. “The Reconstruction Amendments were an anticaste, antisubordination reset for the Nation, not a mere spot treatment for the dark stain of slavery.” — KBJ

i cannot imagine how fucking TIRED Kentaji Brown Jackson must be, and what it must take to continue, over and over, to write the law as it is and refuse to be cowed by these gaslighting, vile coworkers even when they vote together. awe-inspiring

I loved this docuseries about life in some of our most rapidly transforming ecosystems, by the multi-talented @arielwaldman.com

Low-Earth orbit has gotten so crowded that new NASA mission proposals need to include (and pay for, out of a limited cost cap!) three collision avoidance maneuvers, and are told to expect 1-5 potential collisions that need to be avoided.

Asteroids regularly slam into Earth, but in 2022 a little bit of Earth slammed into an asteroid - in the shape of NASA's DART spacecraft hitting Dimorphos. This autumn ESA's Hera spacecraft reaches this same body to try and find out: could we save Earth from an incoming asteroid? #AsteroidDay

~2 gigapixels is a lot of pixels and makes for a stunning image. I think it's 4.5 degrees in diameter (!!). For comparison, the Hubble / JWST field of view is something like 4000x smaller in area if I did the math right. 🧪

Congrats, @vrubinobs.bsky.social! We can't wait to see what mysteries of the distant universe you unlock. 🔭

And the reason Russell Vought is able to act in a “post-constitutional” way from OMB is because he knows the Roberts Court will back him. It’s all part of the same organized movement conservative effort, and defeating it and restoring democratic self-government will require us to organize.

Court can't go on like this. The Constitution as plainly as possible says people who were born here have an unequivocal right to citizenship. Four people whose ONLY job is to read the Constitution for the rest of their lives just tried to overturn it because they're tired of brown people. Pack it.

More owls in the moonlight

From NASA Tonight's full Moon has an atmosphere too — just extraordinarily thin. With about a quadrillion times fewer molecules in a given space than Earth's, it’s so sparse that space rocks strike the surface directly instead of burning up! go.nasa.gov/4f5xx8D

Chromostereopsis and stereo kinetic effect

Some Miraflores lookalikes higher on these slopes?

🔭 Mars Marathon by Perseverance Image Credit: NASA, LPL (U. Arizona), MRO, HiRISE ap260627

A robot from Earth takes a closer look at what, in some ancient eon, might have been a mud flat sometimes submerged in water science.nasa.gov/mission/msl-...