TYB
NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day
June 19, 2026
Starry Night II
Does this scene look familiar? It is a modern recreation of the famous painting Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh. Both the image and the painting depict a tall tree on the left, a crescent moon on the upper right, the planet Venus just to the right of the tree, a foreground horizon rising from left to right, and clouds above the horizon. Differences include that the photograph was taken in mid-April earlier this year in Cascavel, Brazil, while the painting was composed in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France, in 1889. The original Starry Night is considered by many to be one of the three most famous paintings in the world today and a statement about the wonders of the night sky. Today is (roughly) the anniversary of the morning that van Gogh saw the sky that he later painted in his version of Starry Night.
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8ecdsSAqO4
Los Angeles Warning 2.0, Big Sunspot Arrive | S0 News and frens
June.19.2026
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNmB9b7kuhE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdcXlSP1P_A (Stefan Burns: A Giant Magma Chamber Under New Mexico is Awakening…)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ev9WefVoEac (On the Pulse with Silki: Megathrust ZONE Is Bombarded by Quakes in JUST MINUTES ! Something Unusual Is Happening !)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJW5uZOj0jI (Cascadia Slow Slips.. Northern California Earthquake activity.Thursday Night)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mt4n-nIpOOA (MrMBB333: People inside were TERRIFIED! "What just HAPPENED?")
https://www.thetraveler.org/cruise-passengers-rattled-as-6-1-quake-shakes-gulf-waters/
https://tenerifeweekly.com/2026/06/19/seismic-activity-under-teide-ign-records-79-earthquakes-in-just-24-hours/
https://www.newsx.com/world/what-is-seismic-wave-how-deep-earth-shock-moved-japan-after-the-2011-tohoku-earthquake-237412/
https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/2248970/over-8300-aftershocks-recorded-after-magnitude-7-8-mindanao-quake
https://www.travelandtourworld.com/news/article/snp1k5a9g64o/
https://news.az/news/two-strong-earthquakes-shake-russias-far-east-kamchatka
https://www.ctvnews.ca/montreal/article/44-magnitude-earthquake-hits-eastern-quebec/
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/06/260617032155.htm
https://www.thedailystar.com/news/state/tropical-storm-remnants-drench-gulf-states-after-tornadoes-hit-the-midwest/article_94724fd4-560d-5ee1-bfc5-7e295a865213.html
https://www.ksdk.com/article/syndication/ott/weather-plus/corvette-museum-destroyed-after-tornado-tears-through-effingham-leveled-homes-farms-national-weather-service/63-af17e4f2-2aee-4b87-a917-aec3c80ecb46
https://meteoagent.com/schumann-resonance-forecast
https://weather.substack.com/
https://www.tornadohq.com/
https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/map/
https://www.volcanodiscovery.com/earthquakes-volcanoes/news/312677/Volcano-earthquake-report-for-Friday-19-Jun-2026.html
https://www.spaceweather.gov/
https://spaceweather.com/
he told me you're getting the 'chinese finger trap' probe
https://spacedaily.com/d-the-interstellar-comet-3i-atlas-discovered-on-july-1-2025-by-a-survey-telescope-in-chile-is-now-believed-by-astronomers-at-oxford-to-be-roughly-7-billion-years-old-meaning-it-was-already/
https://ras.ac.uk/news-and-press/research-highlights/newly-discovered-interstellar-object-may-be-oldest-comet-ever
other space objects
https://www.esa.int/Space_Safety/Planetary_Defence/ESA_analysing_fireball_over_Europe_on_8_March_2026
https://x.com/NASA_Marshall/status/2067701368052146404
The interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS, discovered on July 1, 2025, by a survey telescope in Chile, is now believed by astronomers at Oxford to be roughly 7 billion years old — meaning it was already drifting through the Milky Way for nearly 3 billion years before our solar system even existed — having formed in a part of the galaxy called the thick disk, where the stars are older than almost everything else humanity has ever observed
June 17, 2026
n the morning of 1 July 2025, the ATLAS survey telescope at Río Hurtado in Chile detected an unusual moving point of light against the background stars. Within a few hours, follow-up observations from other telescopes had confirmed the object’s trajectory: this was not a solar-system comet on a long elliptical orbit, but a body moving through the inner solar system on a hyperbolic path, travelling too fast and at too steep an angle to have originated from any region gravitationally bound to the Sun. The object was, in other words, an interstellar visitor — only the third such object ever confirmed, after 1I/’Oumuamua in 2017 and 2I/Borisov in 2019. It was named 3I/ATLAS in honour of the survey that detected it. By the time the discovery announcement reached the broader astronomical community, a graduate student at the University of Oxford had already started running it through a predictive model he had spent the previous several years developing — and what the model returned was, by every available indication, the most remarkable interstellar visitor humanity has yet encountered.
According to the Royal Astronomical Society’s announcement of the Oxford analysis, the graduate student was Matthew Hopkins, who had defended his PhD thesis just one week before 3I/ATLAS was discovered. Hopkins had developed, with co-author Chris Lintott and colleagues at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, what they call the Ōtautahi-Oxford Model — a statistical framework for inferring the origin and age of interstellar objects from their orbital trajectories. The discovery of 3I/ATLAS turned out to be the first real-time test of the model on a brand-new object. Hopkins ran the analysis. The result was striking enough that Hopkins, who had been planning to start a holiday, instead spent the following days comparing the data to his model’s predictions. The headline conclusion: 3I/ATLAS has approximately a two-thirds probability of being older than the solar system, with a statistical best estimate of approximately 7 billion years — making it, by the Oxford team’s analysis, the oldest comet humanity has ever observed.
What “the thick disk” actually means
As reported by Space.com’s coverage of the Hopkins-Lintott analysis, the key piece of evidence pointing toward the extreme age of 3I/ATLAS is its steep angle of approach. The Milky Way galaxy is not a uniform structure. Most of its stars, including the Sun, sit in a relatively thin disc that rotates around the galactic centre — a flat layer of younger, metal-rich stars approximately 1,000 light-years thick. Above and below this thin disc lies a substantially larger, more diffuse structure called the thick disc — a population of older stars, typically 10 to 12 billion years old, that orbit the galaxy on inclined paths and pass through the thin disc rather than residing within it. 3I/ATLAS arrived from a steep angle that traces directly back to the thick disc population. Its trajectory was the diagnostic signature that allowed Hopkins’s team to conclude, with statistical confidence, that the comet had formed around a star far older than the Sun.
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The thick disc is older than the thin disc but is not the oldest component of the galaxy. The Milky Way’s stellar halo — a much more diffuse population of stars extending well above and below the disc — contains stars approximately 12 to 13 billion years old, dating to within a billion years of the Big Bang itself. Globular clusters, which orbit the galaxy in three dimensions rather than in the disc plane, contain some of the oldest known stars. But the thick disc is the oldest component dense enough to be a plausible source of interstellar comets reaching the inner solar system on observable trajectories. The previous two interstellar objects, 1I/’Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov, both originated in the thin disc and were therefore comparable in age to the Sun or younger. 3I/ATLAS is the first sample any human telescope has ever obtained from material formed in the much older star systems that populate the thick disc.
What 3I/ATLAS is made of
Per EarthSky’s coverage of the chemical composition of 3I/ATLAS, initial spectroscopic observations have identified the comet as water-ice-rich, with apparent enhancement in volatile compounds relative to comets formed within the solar system. The chemistry is consistent with formation around an older, lower-metallicity star — one whose protoplanetary disc would have contained different ratios of light elements, carbon compounds, and water than the disc that produced the Sun and its planets. Comets are, in cosmochemical terms, frozen samples of the protoplanetary disc material from which they formed. A comet from a 7-billion-year-old star system therefore preserves, in its volatile inventory and isotopic ratios, direct evidence of what the chemistry of the galaxy looked like at a substantially earlier point in its evolution than anything previously available to direct sampling.
This makes 3I/ATLAS scientifically valuable beyond its status as a single remarkable object. The comet is, in effect, a small frozen specimen of the early Milky Way, delivered to the inner solar system by approximately 7 billion years of interstellar drift. By the time it passed closest to the Sun on 29 October 2025 and closest to Earth on 19 December 2025 — at a safe distance of 168 million miles — astronomers had used Hubble, ground-based telescopes, and several space-based instruments to gather as much spectroscopic and imaging data as the brief window allowed. The comet has now passed its closest approach and is heading back out of the solar system, never to return. The data collected during its passage will be analysed for years.
What comes next
The discovery of 3I/ATLAS is, by every available indication, the leading edge of what is likely to become a substantially larger field of interstellar-object science over the next decade. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, currently beginning operations in Chile, is expected to detect interstellar objects at a far higher rate than any previous survey — possibly several per year rather than one every few years. The statistical case for the existence of approximately one interstellar object per year passing through the solar system was already well-established from the ‘Oumuamua and Borisov detections; most have simply been too small, too dim, or too transient to be caught by existing surveys. The Rubin Observatory’s combination of wide field of view, deep sensitivity, and rapid cadence should change this. Each future interstellar visitor will be a new opportunity to test the Hopkins-Lintott statistical framework, to compare chemical compositions across objects of different ages and galactic origins, and to assemble a substantially more complete picture of what the rest of the Milky Way is made of.
3I/ATLAS itself will not be back. Its hyperbolic trajectory carries it out of the solar system and back into interstellar space on a path that will not bring it near the Sun again. Whatever further drift it makes through the Milky Way over the next several billion years — whether it eventually encounters another stellar system, drifts indefinitely between them, or is scattered into the galactic halo — is now no longer accessible to terrestrial observation. The Oxford team’s analysis, if their two-thirds statistical confidence holds up to further scrutiny, places the comet’s formation in a galactic environment approximately 2.4 billion years older than the Sun. That number alone makes 3I/ATLAS the oldest piece of material from outside the solar system that humans have ever knowingly sampled, by a margin of approximately the entire previous age range of observed comets combined.
Obama Presidential Center opens with astronaut jacket on display
June 19, 2026
Among the artifacts now on display in the newly-opened Barack Obama Presidential Center is a jacket that was only worn for a few minutes.
Found in the "Science and Innovation" exhibit on the fifth level of the South Side of Chicago museum, the iconic "NASA blue" flight garment is of the type that astronauts wear when training on jets and while making public appearances.
This coat, though, has a name tag that reads "President of the United States."
Gifted to Obama in the Oval Office in November 2011, the jacket is adorned by mission patches that represent astronauts that he worked with and key spaceflights that occurred during the first of his two terms as the country's leader.
There is an emblem for the space shuttle crew who deployed the Hubble Space Telescope, including pilot Charlie Bolden who Obama named as his NASA Administrator, and an insignia for the astronauts who installed the Quest airlock for the International Space Station, among them Janet Kavandi, then the agency's director of flight operations.
There is a patch from the last flight of space shuttle Endeavour, which Obama traveled to Florida to see launch but missed due to a scrub.
Instead he visited with its crew, including commander Mark Kelly, who later became a U.S. senator and attended the Obama Center's grand opening ceremony on Thursday (June 18).
Lastly, on the jacket's right shoulder are sewn the badges for the first and last missions of the 30-year space shuttle program.
It was the STS-135 crew (together with Kavandi) who gave Obama the jacket "in appreciation of his support of space programs," as the artifact label in the museum reads.
Similar jackets were presented to presidents Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump, but Obama was the only one to put it on and model it for the astronauts to see.
The Oval Office event was not Obama's only encounter with a NASA garment when he was president. The jacket is displayed opposite a photo mural showing the president speaking on the South Lawn during the White House Astronomy Night in 2015.
Obama is flanked to one side by an extravehicular mobility unit, or EMU, like space shuttle and station crew members wear to conduct spacewalks.
The jacket and photo are representative of most of the artifacts in the museum. They focus more on how Obama interacted with others than shine a light on him.
"It's why we designed the center not not to be some lifeless mausoleum. I am too young for that," said Obama at Thursday's ribbon cutting.
"We wanted it to be a vibrant, living celebration of community where we can learn together and share the joys of art and music and sport and play.
Because it's in those moments that we're reminded of our common humanity and strengthen the bonds of trust that not only make our lives richer, but make our democracy stronger."
That theme extends to another astronaut-related feature of the Obama Center. Located on Level 5, the "Imagine Your Impact" exhibit was named in honor of Mae Jemison by Exelon, which underwrote its creation. Jemison is a former NASA astronaut and the first Black woman to fly into space in 1992.
"Imagine Your Impact" focuses on how individual actions combine to impact our collective future by exploring the successes of figures such as Jemison, whose work laid the groundwork for progress.
In addition to artifacts and interactives, the Obama Presidential Center is also home to many works of art, from various interpretations of the "Hope" poster created by street artist Shepard Fairey (who later designed a mission patch for a U.S. National Laboratory payload on the space station) to Kiki Smith's "Receive," a large bronze sculpture of the moon and stars celebrating our "shared connection to the cosmos, offering hope, orientation and solace in the heart of the museum."
During his presidency, Obama was in office for the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing; NASA launched the first U.S. mission to the moon in more than 10 years (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, LRO and LCROSS); his administration established and saw the launch of the commercial crew program; and, with Congress, further development of the Orion spacecraft and Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, now elements of NASA's Artemis program.
https://www.collectspace.com/news/news-061926a-obama-presidential-center-space-exhibits.html
https://science.nasa.gov/missions/nasas-lucy-reveals-wobbling-peanut-shaped-asteroid/
extra NASA
https://www.space.com/space-exploration/private-spaceflight/annie-easley-a-hero-of-nasa-space-photo-of-the-day-for-june-19-2026
https://science.nasa.gov/blog/curiosity-blog-sols-4920-4926-surveying-the-bands/
https://phys.org/news/2026-06-nasa-biocontainment-facility-moon-earth.html
https://share.america.gov/what-lies-ahead-for-artemis-and-moon/
NASA’s Lucy Reveals Wobbling, Peanut-Shaped Asteroid
Jun 18, 2026
Even small asteroids lead complex lives. During its flyby of the asteroid Donaldjohanson last year, NASA’s Lucy spacecraft revealed the asteroid to be a wobbly, peanut-shaped body that has undergone a lot of activity in its relatively short history.
Formed as fragments coalesced after a violent collision 155 million years ago, the asteroid was transformed by the small but inexorable force of the Sun’s radiation, all while retaining signs of the brief presence of liquid water in its distant past.
Zooming through the main asteroid belt toward one of the Jupiter Trojan asteroid groups, the Lucy spacecraft collected the first close-up images and other data at Donaldjohanson on April 20, 2025, as it passed 650 miles away from the asteroid.
The data revealed that, instead of spinning simply around one axis like most other asteroids and planets, Donaldjohanson has a more complicated two-axis rotation. Scientists also saw Donaldjohanson’s peanut shape and the craters and ridges on its surface.
Lucy’s encounter with the asteroid was planned as a dress rehearsal for the spacecraft and mission team before its primary asteroid encounters, which begin with Lucy’s flyby of the Trojan asteroid Eurybates on Aug. 12, 2027.
The instruments performed as expected, and, as a bonus, scientists got a rare opportunity to study a previously unexplored asteroid up close and to compare it to two asteroids with similar compositions but different histories: Bennu, the target of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx sample-return mission, and Ryugu, the site of JAXA’s (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) Hayabusa2 sample-return mission.
Here’s what Lucy’s science team has learned so far from Lucy’s encounter with Donaldjohanson, as reported on June 18 in the journal Science.
Wobbling rotation
With Earth-based telescopes, observers saw fluctuations in the light Donaldjohanson reflects, regular patterns of peaks and valleys, typical of an elongated object rotating once every 10.5 Earth days.
But Lucy’s data revealed another pattern: Donaldjohanson appears to be rotating like a wobbly top. Paper authors reported that the asteroid rotates end-over-end once every 10.5 Earth days, and wobbles back and forth around its long axis once every 26.5 days.
Peanut shape
While the Earth-based observations hinted at Donaldjohanson’s elongated shape, the Lucy flyby revealed a “bilobate” structure: two lobes connected by a neck, like a peanut.
These lobes are likely two fragments from an asteroid collision that gently came together afterward by their mutual gravity.
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Donaldjohanson likely rotated at least 10 times faster when it formed, having slowed to its current rate in the last 20 to 60 million years, the team estimates.
As it slowed, the balance between the centrifugal force pushing things apart and gravity pulling things together changed and loose rocky material slid down slopes creating the worn-down appearance of many craters, as the flyby images showed.
The paper’s authors say that the asteroid’s slowing rotation is likely caused by a subtle consequence of solar heating known as the YORP effect.
Each part of the asteroid’s Sun-warmed surface radiates heat away as infrared light, and that radiation imparts a tiny recoil force to the surface. Because the asteroid’s shape isn’t symmetric, this results in a net torque, or twist, that can change the asteroid’s rotation.
Thus, YORP can slow asteroid spins down or speed them up, as in the case of Bennu (once every four hours) and Ryugu (once about every seven hours), which both likely used to rotate much slower than they do today.
Fleeting water
As it passed by Donaldjohanson at 30,000 mph, Lucy recorded the signatures of iron-rich clay minerals on the surface.
These clays must have formed in the distant past with the help of liquid water. However, the exposure must have been brief, Lucy scientists concluded, because iron in clays tends to be replaced with other elements, such as magnesium, as water lingers.
Indeed, scientists saw magnesium-rich clays at Bennu and Ryugu, which suggested prolonged water exposure, perhaps lasting millions of years, when they were still part of larger asteroids.
This difference in water exposure history, and other characteristics, may mean that the parent bodies of these asteroids formed at different times or in different regions of the solar system before relocating to the main belt.
Compare, contrast
Donaldjohanson is thought to be made from rocky remnants of a larger, carbon- and water-rich asteroid that collided with another object in the main asteroid belt. Bennu and Ryugu are thought to have formed in the same way and in the same region.
But Donaldjohanson is different. At 155 million years old, it is much younger than Bennu and Ryugu, which formed 1 to 2 billion years ago.
Donaldjohanson also has remained in the asteroid belt since birth, while its wandering cousins migrated into orbits around the Sun that bring them close to Earth’s orbit about once a year (which made them perfect close targets for sample return missions).
"It’s helpful for scientists to compare Donaldjohanson with asteroids like Bennu and Ryugu, which are seemingly similar asteroids, because every subtle difference is another clue to our origin story,” said Simone Marchi, Lucy deputy principal investigator and lead author of the study at the Boulder, Colorado, office of the Southwest Research Institute.
“Once we start learning more about the Trojans, a completely different population of space rocks with very different histories, our understanding of solar system formation is destined to be challenged,” said Marchi.
Named after a fossilized skeleton of a human ancestor discovered in Ethiopia in 1974, NASA’s Lucy will be the first mission to explore Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids, a population of well-preserved space rocks that formed early in our solar system’s history and could help scientists understand how the planets formed and moved around before settling in their current configuration.
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Advanced Tech on Station Informing Space-Designed Health Treatments
June 18, 2026 1:46PM
The Expedition 74 crew explored how weightlessness affects cartilage growth and the digestive system on Thursday to protect crew health and improve patient care on Earth.
The orbital residents are also gearing up for a robotics maintenance spacewalk at the end of the month on the International Space Station.
Conducting research in the microgravity environment of the orbiting laboratory provides unique insights unobtainable in Earth’s gravity.
This helps scientists, doctors, and engineers develop space-influenced therapies, medicines, and products leading to advances in human health, industrial processes, spacecraft designs, and more.
Cartilage cells are growing aboard the orbital outpost that may inform new ways to treat disabilities and repair injuries.
NASA flight engineers Jessica Meir and Chris Williams worked together on the biotechnology investigation using the Kibo laboratory module’s Life Science Glovebox.
Williams retrieved the cartilage cell samples preserved in a science freezer then thawed them to begin scientific operations.
Next, Meir nourished the cell samples inside the glovebox and stowed them inside a research incubator so they could begin growing.
Manufacturing cartilage tissues in space could lead to self-repairing implants on Earth and advanced fitness techniques for astronauts on a long-term spaceflight.
Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikaev joined each other after breakfast and scanned their abdominal region using an ultrasound device for a digestion study.
The real-time biomedical data will give doctors insight into how microgravity affects the blood flow and shape of a crew member’s digestive organs after a meal.
Results may help advance methods to monitor and improve digestive health both on Earth and in space.
Meir and flight engineer Sophie Adenot of ESA (European Space Agency) also conducted ultrasound scans using ESA’s EchoFinder-2 device to image the major blood vessels and key organs in their abdomen.
The human research experiment uses augmented reality to assist with the scans and artificial intelligence to recognize organs.
The lightweight, easy-to-use gear may enable independent crew health monitoring on spacecraft travelling to the Moon, Mars, and beyond.
Adenot then joined NASA flight engineer Jack Hathaway and studied procedures necessary to prepare astronauts for a spacewalk.
The duo reviewed spacesuit handling techniques, Quest airlock pressurization and depressurization steps, and emergency responses.
Adenot also partnered with Meir and Williams and serviced the lithium-ion batteries that power the spacesuits.
NASA will soon announce the two astronauts who will exit the space station on June 30 to repair a wrist joint on the Canadarm2 robotic arm.
Roscosmos flight engineer Andrey Fedyaev had a busy day of science and maintenance beginning his shift downloading and reading data collected from a station radiation detector.
Afterward, Fedyaev transferred water from the Progress 94 resupply ship into tanks inside the orbital outpost’s Roscosmos segment.
Finally, the two-time cosmonaut wrapped up his shift testing artificial intelligence tools to boost crew efficiency and communications in space.
https://www.nasa.gov/blogs/spacestation/2026/06/18/advanced-tech-on-station-informing-space-designed-health-treatments/
extra extra NASA
https://www.space.com/space-exploration/human-spaceflight/menstruation-in-space-will-be-studied-for-1st-time-with-operation-period
https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/stages-of-star-formation/
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-awards-contract-for-commercial-satellite-data-acquisition/
https://science.nasa.gov/photojournal/desert-field-test-with-nasa-advanced-rover-prototype/