TYB
NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day
July 2, 2025
Milky Way Through Otago Spires
Does the Milky Way always rise between these two rocks? No. Capturing this stunning alignment took careful planning: being in the right place at the right time. In the featured image taken in June 2024 from Otago, New Zealand, the bright central core of our Milky Way Galaxy, home to the many of our Galaxy's 400 billion stars, can be seen between two picturesque rocks spires. For observers in Earth's Northern Hemisphere, the core is only visible throughout the summer. As Earth orbits the Sun, different parts of the Milky Way become visible at different angles at different times of the night. As Earth rotates, the orientation of the Milky Way in the sky also shifts – sometimes standing vertically as seen in the featured image, and other times stretching parallel to the horizon, making it harder to see. In early June, observers can watch it emerge low on the horizon after sunset and gradually arc upward to reveal its full grandeur.
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
NASA Curiosity Rover
Curiosity Blog, Sols 4584–4585: Just a Small Bump
Jun 30, 2025
Earth planning date: Friday, June 27, 2025
We weren’t able to unstow Curiosity’s robotic arm on Wednesday because of some potentially unstable rocks under Curiosity’s wheels, but we liked the rocks at Wednesday’s location enough that we decided to spend a sol repositioning the rover so that we’d have another chance today to analyze them.
The small adjustment of the rover’s position, or “bump,” as we like to call it during tactical planning, was successful, and we found ourselves in a nice stable pose this morning which allowed us to use our highly capable robotic arm to observe the rocks in front of us.
We will be collecting APXS and MAHLI observations of two targets today. The first, “Santa Elena,” is the bumpy rock that caught our eye on Wednesday. The second, informally named “Estancia Allkamari,” is a patch of nearby sand.
We’ll analyze this target to understand if and how the sand composition has changed as we’ve driven across Mount Sharp, and to better help us understand how sand may be contributing to future compositional measurements that cover mixtures of sand and rock.
MAHLI and ChemCam will team up to observe a third target named “Ticatica,” which is another bumpy rock nearby that looks like it might have a dark patch on its side.
This is the final weekend of this Martian year when temperature and relative humidity in Gale crater hit the sweet spot where conditions are right for frost to form in the pre-dawn hours.
We’re taking this last opportunity to see if we can catch any evidence of frost with the ChemCam laser, shooting a sandy (and hopefully cold) portion of the ground in the pre-dawn hours on a target named “Rio Huasco.”
Other activities in the plan include atmospheric monitoring, Mastcam mosaics, including a 20 x 3 mosaic of the large boxwork structures in the distance, and a short drive to the southwest to check out a rocky raised ridge.
https://science.nasa.gov/blog/curiosity-blog-sols-4584-4585-just-a-small-bump/
Curiosity Blog, Sols 4586-4587: Straight Drive, Strategic Science
Jul 01, 2025
Earth planning date: Monday, June 30, 2025
Our weekend drive placed Curiosity exactly where we had hoped: on lighter-toned, resistant bedrock we have been eyeing for close study. Curiosity’s workspace tosol did not contain any targets suitable for DRT.
After a detailed discussion by the team, weighing science not only in tosol’s plan but the holiday-shifted sols ahead, the decision was made to perform contact science at the current workspace and then drive in the second sol of the plan.
Normally, drives in the second sol of a two-sol plan are uncommon, as we require information on the ground to assess in advance of the next sol's planning.
At present however, the current “Mars time” is quite favorable, enabling Curiosity’s team to operate within “nominal sols” and receive the necessary data in time for Wednesday’s one-sol plan.
DAN kicked off the first sol of the plan with a passive measurement, complemented by another in the afternoon and two more on the second sol.
Arm activities focused on placing MAHLI and APXS on “La Paz” and “Playa Agua de Luna,” two lighter-toned, laminated rocks.
The rest of the first sol was rounded out with ChemCam LIBS analyses on “La Joya” followed by further LIBS analyses on “La Vega” on the second sol, once Curiosity’s arm was out of the way of the laser.
ChemCam and Mastcam additionally imaged “Mishe Mokwa” prior to the nearly straight drive of about 20 meters (about 66 feet).
Environmental monitoring activities, imaging of the CheMin inlet cover, and a SAM EBT activity rounded out Curiosity’s efforts on the second sol.
https://science.nasa.gov/blog/curiosity-blog-sols-4586-4587-straight-drive-strategic-science/
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/msl-curiosity/science-updates/
https://science.nasa.gov/science-research/heliophysics/nasa-missions-help-explain-predict-severity-of-solar-storms/
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/adb8d3
NASA Missions Help Explain, Predict Severity of Solar Storms
Jul 01, 2025
An unexpectedly strong solar storm rocked our planet on April 23, 2023, sparking auroras as far south as southern Texas in the U.S. and taking the world by surprise.
Two days earlier, the Sun blasted a coronal mass ejection (CME) — a cloud of energetic particles, magnetic fields, and solar material — toward Earth.
Space scientists took notice, expecting it could cause disruptions to Earth’s magnetic field, known as a geomagnetic storm. But the CME wasn’t especially fast or massive, and it was preceded by a relatively weak solar flare, suggesting the storm would be minor.
But it became severe. Using NASA heliophysics missions, new studies of this storm and others are helping scientists learn why some CMEs have more intense effects — and better predict the impacts of future solar eruptions on our lives.
Why Was This Storm So Intense?
A paper published in the Astrophysical Journal on March 31 suggests the CME’s orientation relative to Earth likely caused the April 2023 storm to become surprisingly strong.
The researchers gathered observations from five heliophysics spacecraft across the inner solar system to study the CME in detail as it emerged from the Sun and traveled to Earth.
They noticed a large coronal hole near the CME’s birthplace. Coronal holes are areas where the solar wind — a stream of particles flowing from the Sun — floods outward at higher than normal speeds.
“The fast solar wind coming from this coronal hole acted like an air current, nudging the CME away from its original straight-line path and pushing it closer to Earth’s orbital plane,” said the paper’s lead author, Evangelos Paouris of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.
“In addition to this deflection, the CME also rotated slightly.” Paouris says this turned the CME’s magnetic fields opposite to Earth’s magnetic field and held them there — allowing more of the Sun’s energy to pour into Earth’s environment and intensifying the storm.
Cool Thermosphere
Meanwhile, NASA’s GOLD (Global-scale Observations of Limb and Disk) mission revealed another unexpected consequence of the April 2023 storm at Earth.
Before, during, and after the storm, GOLD studied the temperature in the middle thermosphere, a part of Earth’s upper atmosphere about 85 to 120 miles overhead. During the storm, temperatures increased throughout GOLD’s wide field of view over the Americas.
But surprisingly, after the storm, temperatures dropped about 90 to 198 degrees Fahrenheit lower than they were before the storm (from about 980 to 1,070 degrees Fahrenheit before the storm to 870 to 980 degrees Fahrenheit afterward).
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“Our measurement is the first to show widespread cooling in the middle thermosphere after a strong storm,” said Xuguang Cai of the University of Colorado, Boulder, lead author of a paper about GOLD’s observations published in the journal JGR Space Physics on April 15, 2025.
The thermosphere’s temperature is important, because it affects how much drag Earth-orbiting satellites and space debris experience.
“When the thermosphere cools, it contracts and becomes less dense at satellite altitudes, reducing drag,” Cai said. “This can cause satellites and space debris to stay in orbit longer than expected, increasing the risk of collisions.
Understanding how geomagnetic storms and solar activity affect Earth’s upper atmosphere helps protect technologies we all rely on — like GPS, satellites, and radio communications.”
Predicting When Storms Strike
To predict when a CME will trigger a geomagnetic storm, or be “geoeffective,” some scientists are combining observations with machine learning. A paper published last November in the journal Solar Physics describes one such approach called GeoCME.
Machine learning is a type of artificial intelligence in which a computer algorithm learns from data to identify patterns, then uses those patterns to make decisions or predictions.
Scientists trained GeoCME by giving it images from the NASA/ESA (European Space Agency) SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) spacecraft of different CMEs that reached Earth along with SOHO images of the Sun before, during, and after each CME.
They then told the model whether each CME produced a geomagnetic storm.
Then, when it was given images from three different science instruments on SOHO, the model’s predictions were highly accurate. Out of 21 geoeffective CMEs, the model correctly predicted all 21 of them; of 7 non-geoeffective ones, it correctly predicted 5 of them.
“The algorithm shows promise,” said heliophysicist Jack Ireland of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who was not involved in the study.
“Understanding if a CME will be geoeffective or not can help us protect infrastructure in space and technological systems on Earth. This paper shows machine learning approaches to predicting geoeffective CMEs are feasible.”
Earlier Warnings
During a severe geomagnetic storm in May 2024 — the strongest to rattle Earth in over 20 years — NASA’s STEREO (Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory) measured the magnetic field structure of CMEs as they passed by.
When a CME headed for Earth hits a spacecraft first, that spacecraft can often measure the CME and its magnetic field directly, helping scientists determine how strong the geomagnetic storm will be at Earth.
Typically, the first spacecraft to get hit are one million miles from Earth toward the Sun at a place called Lagrange Point 1 (L1), giving us only 10 to 60 minutes advanced warning.
By chance, during the May 2024 storm, when several CMEs erupted from the Sun and merged on their way to Earth, NASA’s STEREO-A spacecraft happened to be between us and the Sun, about 4 million miles closer to the Sun than L1.
A paper published March 17, 2025, in the journal Space Weather reports that if STEREO-A had served as a CME sentinel, it could have provided an accurate prediction of the resulting storm’s strength 2 hours and 34 minutes earlier than a spacecraft could at L1.
According to the paper’s lead author, Eva Weiler of the Austrian Space Weather Office in Graz, “No other Earth-directed superstorm has ever been observed by a spacecraft positioned closer to the Sun than L1.”
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Brain, Cancer, and Biotech Top Science Schedule as Cargo Craft Departs
July 1, 2025
The 11 crew members aboard the International Space Station representing Expedition 73 and Axiom Mission 4 (Ax-4) returned to their space science duties on Tuesday exploring brain circulation, observing cancer cells, and studying biotechnology, among other investigations.
Station Commander Takuya Onishi from JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) attached sensors to his neck and chest measuring how blood flows from the brain to the heart.
Doctors will review the data to understand how blood circulation adapts to weightlessness. Ax-4 crewmates Peggy Whitson and Tibor Kapu also studied cerebral circulation for another experiment designed for their mission.
Whitson assisted Kapu who wore a cap using doppler ultrasound to image blood flow in his cerebral artery while a cuff measured his blood pressure. Doctors will use the results to help protect crew visual processing and perception in microgravity.
Whitson later peered inside a fluorescence microscope at cancer cells to learn how to detect and prevent cancer earlier.
NASA Flight Engineers Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers spent a portion of their shift assisting the Ax-4 crew on Tuesday. McClain helped the private astronauts operate the research hardware throughout the orbital lab and guided their science activities.
Ayers set up a microscope in the Destiny laboratory module that Ax-4 crew member Shubhanshu Shukla used to view how tardigrades, tiny aquatic animals, survive numerous harsh climates including microgravity.
Ax-4 astronaut Sławosz Uznański-Wiśniewski explored using nanomaterials in wearable devices that monitor crew health.
NASA Flight Engineer Jonny Kim began his shift with Onishi collecting blood samples, processing them in a centrifuge, and stowing the specimens in a science freezer for preservation.
Kim later reorganized hardware inside the Harmony module’s maintenance work area then installed ventilation system components inside the Quest airlock.
The uncrewed, trash-packed Progress 90 cargo craft ended its stay at the orbital outpost today undocking from the Poisk module at 2:42 p.m. EDT.
It will reenter Earth’s atmosphere for a fiery, but safe demise above the south Pacific Ocean completing a seven-month space delivery mission.
Waiting to replace the spacecraft is the Progress 92 cargo craft standing at the launch pad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The Progress 92 is counting down to its launch at 3:32 p.m. EDT on Thursday.
It will arrive at the orbital lab on Saturday and dock to Poisk at 5:27 p.m. delivering about three thousand pounds of food, fuel and supplies for the orbiting lab residents. NASA+ will provide live coverage of both events.
Roscosmos Flight Engineers Sergey Ryzhikov and Alexey Zubritskiy began their day training on the telerobotically operated rendezvous unit, or TORU, for Saturday’s approach and rendezvous of the Progress 92.
Ryzhikov then set up hardware to capture hyperspectral imagery of landmarks in Mexico and South America. Zubritskiy photographed the Progress 90 as it departed the station.
Roscosmos Flight Engineer Kirill Peskov checked a laptop computer used for European robotic arm operations then completed a 24-hour session wearing sensors that measured his heart activity and blood pressure.
https://www.nasa.gov/blogs/spacestation/2025/07/01/brain-cancer-and-biotech-top-science-schedule-as-cargo-craft-departs/
NASA Assigns Astronaut Anil Menon to First Space Station Mission
Jul 01, 2025, 13:45 ET
NASA astronaut Anil Menon will embark on his first mission to the International Space Station, serving as a flight engineer and Expedition 75 crew member.
Menon will launch aboard the Roscosmos Soyuz MS-29 spacecraft in June 2026, accompanied by Roscosmos cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov and Anna Kikina.
After launching from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, the trio will spend approximately eight months aboard the orbiting laboratory.
During his expedition, Menon will conduct scientific investigations and technology demonstrations to help prepare humans for future space missions and benefit humanity.
Selected as a NASA astronaut in 2021, Menon graduated with the 23rd astronaut class in 2024. After completing initial astronaut candidate training, he began preparing for his first space station flight assignment.
Menon was born and raised in Minneapolis and is an emergency medicine physician, mechanical engineer, and colonel in the United States Space Force.
He holds a bachelor's degree in neurobiology from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a master's degree in mechanical engineering, and a medical degree from Stanford University in California.
Menon completed his emergency medicine and aerospace medicine residency at Stanford and the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston.
In his spare time, he still practices emergency medicine at Memorial Hermann's Texas Medical Center and teaches residents at the University of Texas' residency program.
Menon served as SpaceX's first flight surgeon, helping to launch the first crewed Dragon spacecraft on NASA's SpaceX Demo-2 mission and building SpaceX's medical organization to support humans on future missions.
He served as a crew flight surgeon for both SpaceX flights and NASA expeditions aboard the space station.
For nearly 25 years, people have lived and worked continuously aboard the International Space Station, advancing scientific knowledge and conducting critical research for the benefit of humanity and our home planet.
Space station research supports the future of human spaceflight as NASA looks toward deep space missions to the Moon under the Artemis campaign and in preparation for future human missions to Mars, as well as expanding commercial opportunities in low Earth orbit and beyond.
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/nasa-assigns-astronaut-anil-menon-to-first-space-station-mission-302495999.html
https://www.nasa.gov/people/nasa-astronaut-anil-menon/
NASA Hosts ISRO Officials at Johnson, Kennedy
Jul 01, 2025
NASA astronaut Raja Chari and Dr. V. Narayanan, chairman of ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation), interact outside the Orion spacecraft mockup at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
Narayanan and Indian officials visited NASA Johnson and NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, ahead of the Axiom Mission 4 launch to the International Space Station.
As part of a collaboration between NASA and ISRO, Axiom Mission 4 delivers on a commitment highlighted by President Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to send the first ISRO astronaut to the station.
The space agencies are participating in five joint science investigations and two in-orbit science, technology, engineering, and mathematics demonstrations.
NASA and ISRO have a long-standing relationship built on a shared vision to advance scientific knowledge and expand space collaboration.
https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/nasa-hosts-isro-officials-at-johnson-kennedy/
https://science.nasa.gov/science-research/science-enabling-technology/technology-highlights/a-new-alloy-is-enabling-ultra-stable-structures-needed-for-exoplanet-discovery/
https://techport.nasa.gov/projects/125342
A New Alloy is Enabling Ultra-Stable Structures Needed for Exoplanet Discovery
Jul 01, 2025
A unique new material that shrinks when it is heated and expands when it is cooled could help enable the ultra-stable space telescopes that future NASA missions require to search for habitable worlds.
One of the goals of NASA’s Astrophysics Division is to determine whether we are alone in the universe. NASA’s astrophysics missions seek to answer this question by identifying planets beyond our solar system (exoplanets) that could support life.
Over the last two decades, scientists have developed ways to detect atmospheres on exoplanets by closely observing stars through advanced telescopes.
As light passes through a planet’s atmosphere or is reflected or emitted from a planet’s surface, telescopes can measure the intensity and spectra (i.e., “color”) of the light, and can detect various shifts in the light caused by gases in the planetary atmosphere.
By analyzing these patterns, scientists can determine the types of gasses in the exoplanet’s atmosphere.
Decoding these shifts is no easy task because the exoplanets appear very near their host stars when we observe them, and the starlight is one billion times brighter than the light from an Earth-size exoplanet.
To successfully detect habitable exoplanets, NASA’s future Habitable Worlds Observatory will need a contrast ratio of one to one billion (1:1,000,000,000).
Achieving this extreme contrast ratio will require a telescope that is 1,000 times more stable than state-of-the-art space-based observatories like NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and its forthcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.
New sensors, system architectures, and materials must be integrated and work in concert for future mission success.
A team from the company ALLVAR is collaborating with NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to demonstrate how integration of a new material with unique negative thermal expansion characteristics can help enable ultra-stable telescope structures.
Material stability has always been a limiting factor for observing celestial phenomena.
For decades, scientists and engineers have been working to overcome challenges such as micro-creep, thermal expansion, and moisture expansion that detrimentally affect telescope stability.
The materials currently used for telescope mirrors and struts have drastically improved the dimensional stability of the great observatories like Webb and Roman, but as indicated in the Decadal Survey on Astronomy and Astrophysics 2020 developed by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, they still fall short of the 10 picometer level stability over several hours that will be required for the Habitable Worlds Observatory.
For perspective, 10 picometers is roughly 1/10th the diameter of an atom.
Funding from NASA and other sources has enabled this material to transition from the laboratory to the commercial scale.
ALLVAR received NASA Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) funding to scale and integrate a new alloy material into telescope structure demonstrations for potential use on future NASA missions like the Habitable Worlds Observatory.
This alloy shrinks when heated and expands when cooled—a property known as negative thermal expansion (NTE). For example, ALLVAR Alloy 30 exhibits a -30 ppm/°C coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE) at room temperature.
This means that a 1-meter long piece of this NTE alloy will shrink 0.003 mm for every 1 °C increase in temperature. For comparison, aluminum expands at +23 ppm/°C.
Because it shrinks when other materials expand, ALLVAR Alloy 30 can be used to strategically compensate for the expansion and contraction of other materials.
The alloy’s unique NTE property and lack of moisture expansion could enable optic designers to address the stability needs of future telescope structures.
Calculations have indicated that integrating ALLVAR Alloy 30 into certain telescope designs could improve thermal stability up to 200 times compared to only using traditional materials like aluminum, titanium, Carbon Fiber Reinforced Polymers (CFRPs), and the nickel–iron alloy, Invar.
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To demonstrate that negative thermal expansion alloys can enable ultra-stable structures, the ALLVAR team developed a hexapod structure to separate two mirrors made of a commercially available glass ceramic material with ultra-low thermal expansion properties.
Invar was bonded to the mirrors and flexures made of Ti6Al4V—a titanium alloy commonly used in aerospace applications—were attached to the Invar.
To compensate for the positive CTEs of the Invar and Ti6Al4V components, an NTE ALLVAR Alloy 30 tube was used between the Ti6Al4V flexures to create the struts separating the two mirrors.
The natural positive thermal expansion of the Invar and Ti6Al4V components is offset by the negative thermal expansion of the NTE alloy struts, resulting in a structure with an effective zero thermal expansion.
The stability of the structure was evaluated at the University of Florida Institute for High Energy Physics and Astrophysics. The hexapod structure exhibited stability well below the 100 pm/√Hz target and achieved 11 pm/√Hz.
This first iteration is close to the 10 pm stability required for the future Habitable Worlds Observatory. A paper and presentation made at the August 2021 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers conference provides details about this analysis.
Furthermore, a series of tests run by NASA Marshall showed that the ultra-stable struts were able to achieve a near-zero thermal expansion that matched the mirrors in the above analysis.
This result translates into less than a 5 nm root mean square (rms) change in the mirror’s shape across a 28K temperature change.
Beyond ultra-stable structures, the NTE alloy technology has enabled enhanced passive thermal switch performance and has been used to remove the detrimental effects of temperature changes on bolted joints and infrared optics.
These applications could impact technologies used in other NASA missions. For example, these new alloys have been integrated into the cryogenic sub-assembly of Roman’s coronagraph technology demonstration.
The addition of NTE washers enabled the use of pyrolytic graphite thermal straps for more efficient heat transfer.
ALLVAR Alloy 30 is also being used in a high-performance passive thermal switch incorporated into the UC Berkeley Space Science Laboratory’s Lunar Surface Electromagnetics Experiment-Night (LuSEE Night) project aboard Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Mission 2, which will be delivered to the Moon through NASA’s CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) initiative.
The NTE alloys enabled smaller thermal switch size and greater on-off heat conduction ratios for LuSEE Night.
Through another recent NASA SBIR effort, the ALLVAR team worked with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to develop detailed datasets of ALLVAR Alloy 30 material properties.
These large datasets include statistically significant material properties such as strength, elastic modulus, fatigue, and thermal conductivity. The team also collected information about less common properties like micro-creep and micro-yield.
With these properties characterized, ALLVAR Alloy 30 has cleared a major hurdle towards space-material qualification.
As a spinoff of this NASA-funded work, the team is developing a new alloy with tunable thermal expansion properties that can match other materials or even achieve zero CTE.
Thermal expansion mismatch causes dimensional stability and force-load issues that can impact fields such as nuclear engineering, quantum computing, aerospace and defense, optics, fundamental physics, and medical imaging.
The potential uses for this new material will likely extend far beyond astronomy. For example, ALLVAR developed washers and spacers, are now commercially available to maintain consistent preloads across extreme temperature ranges in both space and terrestrial environments.
These washers and spacers excel at counteracting the thermal expansion and contraction of other materials, ensuring stability for demanding applications.
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pimp my rickshaw
MAGA Painter Thinks NASA Is Lying, Suggested the Earth Is Flat
July 1, 2025
In May, Donald Trump invited painter Vanessa Horabuena to the White House to personally deliver one of her signature portraits.
In a Facebook post recounting the visit, Horabuena described a surreal moment as Trump praised her to a room that included Charlie Kirk, Judge Jeanine Pirro, and Pam Bondi.
“He went on and on about how much he loves my art,” she wrote, adding that Pirro’s words were “very impactful” and that the group was “encouraging and genuine.”
On Truth Social Tuesday, Trump thanked Horabuena for having her portrait of himself now on display at the Colorado state capitol. Previously, Trump complained about the painting of himself that was on display calling for a replacement.
Known for speed-painting Trump live at rallies and other events while worship music plays, Horabuena blends patriotic and religious imagery—often showing Jesus with American flags or Trump in reverent poses not captured in reality.
However, that's not the only thing untethered from reality. MeidasTouch has uncovered that Horabuena’s public posts also reveal a deep embrace of anti-science conspiracy theories.
On November 4, 2023, she posted, “The moon landing never happened. They lie and lie and lie.”
In another post, she wrote, “Can you believe the moon Landing didn’t happen and still be an on fire Christian who leads others to Christ at the same time? I think so 😎🔥🙌🏽.”
Horabuena implied that the devil was behind pushing what she believed to be the moon landing deception.
That same thread included warnings about fluoride and a comment from Horabuena stating, “NASA lies and also [scientists] lie telling people creation never happened."
Horabuena sees science as antithetical to faith in Jesus, a view that not all other believers hold including former astronauts.
Horabuena also agreed with a post suggesting that NASA requires astronauts to be skilled scuba divers, implying space footage is shot underwater for a low-gravity effect.
The post also suggested astronauts need to be skilled liars and advanced freemasons.
The MAGA artist has endorsed flat Earth theories as well—responding to comments about Antarctica being “forbidden”.
Flat-earthers often believe that a treaty prevents people from exploring Antarctica on their own and discovering the truth.
Horabuena shared a flat Earth map with the caption, “the UN has this interesting map hung up in NY.”
The picture showed a flat earth surrounded by an ice wall with other continents beyond it, a commons belief held by some flat-earthers.
The pro-Trump artist also liked other Facebook posts questioning NASA and pushing a flat earth line of questioning.
Additionally, in April 2024, she thanked a follower for posting a conspiracy theory that blamed HAARP and NOAA for tornadoes in the Midwest and floods in South Africa, suggesting that "a large blob anomaly" from Antarctica were being covered up by mainstream media.
Some critics see Horabuena’s art as depicting Trump as a Christ-like figure.
Now we know she sees modern science as a Satanic plot, the Earth as a flat, enclosed realm, and her brush and platform as a weapon in a spiritual war for truth against NASA.
The fact that Trump created Space Force and oversees NASA as president is apparently no problem for Horabuena's worldview.
https://meidasnews.com/news/maga-painter-thinks-nasa-is-lying-suggested-the-earth-is-flat
https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/114779538689137058
https://www.youtube.com/@VanessaHorabuenaOfficial
https://truthsocial.com/@VanessaHorabuena