The NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile has unveiled the very first “mega” images of the cosmos obtained thanks to the extraordinary features and wide-field view of its LSST camera—the largest in the world. The camera took nearly two decades to build and involved hundreds of scientists across the globe, including a number of CNRS teams. The world-wide First Look unveiling event is held on 23 June at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C.

The Center for Space Exploration Research at the University of California, Davis, has partnered with Proteus Space to launch a US government-sponsored satellite into space with a custom AI-enabled payload. The UC Davis-designed payload is a dynamic digital twin that models the current condition and predicts the future state of the spacecraft’s power system, running in real time onboard the spacecraft instead of in ground-based mission control.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has made it possible to characterize known exoplanets since it was commissioned in 2022. Thanks to research led by a CNRS researcher at the Observatoire de Paris-PSL associated with the Université Grenoble Alpes, the telescope recently captured the direct image of a previously unknown exoplanet. This discovery, which will be published in the journal Nature, is a first for the telescope, and was achieved using the French-produced coronagraph installed on the JWST’s MIRI instrument.

Astronomers from The University of New Mexico, along with U.S. and international researchers, have confirmed the existence of a new giant exoplanet, made possible through a collaboration with citizen sciences around the world. The discovery is detailed in a new paper published in The Astronomical Journal, with Postdoctoral Fellow Zahra Essack, Ph.D. as lead author, and Assistant Professor Diana Dragomir as co-author.

A Japanese research team has harnessed the unique microgravity environment aboard the International Space Station (ISS) to elucidate, for the first time, the detailed structure of amyloid β fibrils bearing the Tottori-type familial mutation (D7N), a rare variant linked to Alzheimer's disease. This space-based breakthrough not only enabled structural analysis that is difficult on Earth but also provides new insights into how disease-related mutations affect fibril formation—paving the way for new therapeutic strategies.

Dr. Congrui Grace Jin and her colleagues from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln have worked for years on bio-manufacturing engineered living materials and have developed a synthetic lichen system that can form building materials with no outside intervention. Their latest study, funded by the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program and recently published in the Journal of Manufacturing Science and Engineering, applies this research to the autonomous construction of structures on Mars, using the planet’s regolith, which includes dust, sand and rocks.