The National Academies are seeking suggestions for experts to participate in a Congressionally mandated consensus study conducting a high-level assessment of current technical and scientific capabilities housed at #NASA GSFC
Submit nominations by 24 April 2026 survey.alchemer.com/s3/8800415/A...

Cover of report "Mission Aborted: how NASA illegally implemented the president's budget request without congressional approval. Minority staff report, prepared by members of the committee on science, space, and technology, us house of representatives, April 2026

This report came out today by minority staff of the House science committee on how three NASA missions were aborted due to NASA illegally following the FY26 president's budget request instead of congressionally approved budget. Very important reading. 🔭🧪 democrats-science.house.gov/staff-report...

Physics bachelors programs at Bowling Green, Kent State, Ohio U, and Wright State will be eliminated! ⚛️🧪🔭

🔭 I have a good problem for the Astro hive mind. I now have several “for funsies” undergrad projects that are turning into publishable work. With the cost of publishing being so high these days — can anyone recommend a reasonably reputable, refereed, free open source journal? Pros and cons?

Yeah, so this is why many astronomers are less than completely excited about the Artemis missions.

(Which is not to detract from the courage and hard work of everyone who made Artemis II so successful! But we have to understand there are other motives involved than science and inspiration.)

Yeah that’s cool

apod.2594674901.bin

#apod 2026-03-26
Black Holes and Neutron Stars: 218 Mergers and Counting
Web page: https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap260326.html

Our sweet collie almost got a field trip to work today because we both forgot he was in the car. 😅 We remembered to take him to doggie day care one intersection before getting on the highway.

Summer internship in Detroit at Outlier Media: What to know Outlier Media is hiring for a 2026 summer internship in Detroit to strengthen and expand the TXT OUTLIER service.

Are you an undergraduate or graduate student at a college or university in Michigan?

Outlier is looking for its next summer intern! Come work in our newsroom to assist with TXT OUTLIER, our text message service that delivers critical information to Detroiters.

Interested? Apply by April 1:

A Table showing the number of positions posted at AAS job-registed for various categories.

Looking at the AAS jobregister lately, it seemed to me that there are less positions available in all categories than in previous years. Wanting to quantify, I used the wayback machine to check on the number of postings in the January-March window and it is quite depressing.

This is the first time that a Concept Study has been killed due directly to the actions of the government that commissioned the study in the first place.

NASA's next X-ray mission, AXIS, has been killed The path to exploring the high-energy Universe was clear and compelling. Here's how 2025's cuts are still causing NASA casualties in 2026.

NASA’s next X-ray mission, AXIS, has been killed

Did you think that the cuts to NASA made in 2025 had all been reversed, and everything is now fine?

Think again.

NASA's AXIS mission, on account of that 2025 bloodbath, is now dead.
bigthink.com/starts-with-...
#space #astro #NASA #AXIS #Xray

seven panel figure showing different JWST transits of TOI-3884 b with a persistent spot-crossing event. TOI-3884 b orbits the pole of a small M dwarf star. the shape of the spot-crossing event changes slightly between each transit. each subpanel has a graphical representation of what the spot looks like during each transit.

really exciting work lead by Catriona Murray! TOI-3884 b is a planet on a polar orbit around an M dwarf. The transit has a persistent starspot crossing event. Using JWST, we measured the properties of the starspot and the Prot of the star 👀 arxiv.org/abs/2603.15414
🔭 #astronomy 🌟 #stellarastro

In this documentary by Ben Proudfoot, Jocelyn Bell Burnell tells her story about being raised as a Quaker, her struggle being the only woman in the room in STEM & how hard it was to pursue that path against the attitude that women were to be in the home. womeninastronomy.blogspot.com/2026/03/i-ch...

Many things to say about X-ray astronomy right now but one quick comment on the quote unquote "smallness" of its community relative to optical astronomy:

Optical astronomy is >>6,000 years old, X-ray astronomy is 60 years old. The size of a community is also a function of its age.

(1/n)...

The gutting of NASA Goddard has had a devastating effect on high energy astrophysics. The AXIS probe mission proposal was rejected without review. (The Goddard X-ray mirror lab was significantly impacted by shutdowns and pressured retirements, against the congress approved budget for NASA.)

Email from Chris Reynolds to the AXIS Team. Subject is disappointing AXIS news. Text of e-mail reads: Dear AXIS Friends, The AXIS team has received some very disappointing news – we have been informed by NASA HQ that AXIS is not eligible for selection and hence the Concept Study Report (CSR) will not be subjected to the full review process. AXIS represents the scientific aspirations of a large international community. As a member of one of the AXIS science working groups, you deserve a candid explanation from the PI of what happened and why. That is the purpose of this note. NASA’s decision was programmatic and not based on a review of the technology or science; the mission profile described in the submitted CSR was over the allowed budget and schedule. How was such a thing possible? In short, with NASA-GSFC as the AXIS managing center, the mission formulation process was critically compromised by the seismic shifts occurring in NASA and the Federal government. The AXIS study team was hit hard by three unprecedented challenges: NASA’s Deferred Resignation Program (DRP) and the pressure at GSFC to resign/retire created a rapid and uncontrolled loss of over 20 personnel with key expertise during a critical mission formulation period, including the main GSFC Project Manager (Jimmy Marsh) and the X-ray mirror lead (Will Zhang) and many discipline engineers.

GSFC priorities rapidly realigned to the FY2026 President’s Budget Request (PBR) that eliminated the Probe program, further reducing the availability of GSFC engineering and mission formulation personnel (incl. cost analysts and schedulers) over the critical Summer and Fall months. Key work was halted for almost seven weeks when the core GSFC AXIS study team, dominated by NASA civil servants, was furloughed during the government shutdown. NASA HQ’s extension to the CSR submission deadline (from 18-Dec-2025 to 29-Jan-2026) was inadequate compensation for the disruption and lost time. Taken together, these factors disrupted the basic grass-roots costing process (which requires extensive “reach back” to the discipline engineers to assess labor requirements) as well as the cost-design iteration process that is central to the formulation of a cost-capped and schedule-constrained mission. While the mission design was finalized in April, our initial grass-roots costing (which was ~10% over budget) could only be completed in September due to the lack of assigned resources. With the subsequent government shutdown and then “pens down” in early-December forced by the GSFC Executive Review process, there was no opportunity to work through the set of cost/schedule savings that had already been identified by the AXIS team. Ultimately, the GSFC executive council gave AXIS leadership the choice of submitting a CSR with a non-compliant schedule and cost, or not submitting a CSR at all. We of course proceeded with the submission, including a narrative that we understood the path to a cost-compliant profile (that we would have discussed with the review panels during the Site Visit). NASA HQ has ruled this stance to be unacceptable. It is important to stress that NASA’s programmatic decision was before any technical review had been conducted. The decision was NOT due to any concerns about AXIS technology. Indeed, the AXIS Phase A work had major successes with furthering

Indeed, the AXIS Phase A work had major successes with furthering the key technologies. GSFC’s Next Generation X-ray Optics (NGXO) team successfully demonstrated iridium-coated, stress-compensated mirror segments that meet AXIS baseline requirements (i.e. segment-level performance at sub-arcsecond level).  NGXO also built the first AXIS demonstrator mirror module, learning critical lessons about mirror alignment, mounting and bonding. On the detector side, MIT quickly moved to fabricate AXIS-like CCDs and, working with our colleagues at Stanford, recently demonstrated that they achieve the required readout rate and spectral resolution. Similarly, NASA’s decision was NOT a judgment of the importance of AXIS science. The AXIS science case was rated excellent in the Step 1 review, and it only became stronger during our Phase A study. The AXIS Community Science Book, which many of you contributed to, is an extremely powerful demonstration of the relevance and importance of high-resolution X-ray observations to all areas of astrophysics. The Science Book is one of the most important legacies of the AXIS Phase A study and, I believe, will help define future mission concepts for many years to come. I thank you all from the bottom of my heart for all of your work on this. AXIS has been a long journey; we started under the leadership of Richard Mushotzky more than nine years ago. During that time, it’s been an enormous privilege to work with amazing people; the AXIS science team, the incredible/brilliant GSFC and Northrop Grumman engineers, and the wider astrophysics community. I am, quite frankly, livid that AXIS ultimately fell victim to the programmatic chaos of 2025. The astronomical community deserves better. I hope that NASA leadership, especially at GSFC and HQ, can have an honest discussion about how to better support and protect programs during extraordinary times.

For now, as a community, we must look forward. There is still one excellent mission under consideration for the Probe program, PRIMA, and we wish them a smooth and speedy path to selection and flight. In X-ray astronomy, the SMEX and MidEX programs represent concrete pathways for focused, high-impact missions, and the scientific case we built for AXIS provides a strong foundation for those concepts. The technologies we advanced in Step 1 and Phase A, particularly the NGXO mirror work and the MIT/Stanford detector demonstrations, can anchor the next generation of proposals. Most importantly, the AXIS Community Science Book, representing more than 500 scientists across, is a living document and a powerful signal to NASA leadership that this community is organized, serious, and not going anywhere. I encourage everyone to use it actively, as a resource for future concept development, for Astro2030 engagement, and for building the next mission that will deliver high angular resolution X-ray imaging to address the fundamental questions about black hole growth, galaxy evolution, and the hot universe that motivated AXIS from the beginning. This community built something remarkable over nine years and that doesn't end here. Thank you again for your support of AXIS over these times. Best Chris and the AXIS leadership team

The @axisprobe.bsky.social team learned that the phase A concept study report of AXIS (the Advanced X-ray Imaging Satellite) will not be reviewed because the lost personnel at NASA Goddard and government shutdown impacted our schedule and budget. 🔭 Here is the PI's e-mail with the explanation.

No foreclosures for these Detroit properties that owe back taxes. Why? The Wayne County treasurer’s office said it has “no set policy” for letting Detroit properties with back taxes avoid foreclosure.

What do a property speculator, a scrapyard operator and a former Packard Plant owner have in common? They have tax debt on Detroit properties that should have put them in foreclosure.

We pressed Wayne County Treasurer Eric Sabree on how he decides who avoids foreclosure. No answers.

4-panel comic: Astronomers asking researchers from different departments to help them identify the “little red dots” in JWST images: (1) Entomologists [Person 1 behind easel that is black with red dots on it, looked at by Person 2 with shoulder-length hair.] PERSON 2: Clover mites. (2) Computer Scientists [Person 1 behind easel that is black with red dots on it, looked at by Person 3 with beanie.] PERSON 3: Stuck pixels. (3) Dermatologists [Person 1 behind easel that is black with red dots on it, looked at by Person 4 with ponytail.] PERSON 4: Cherry angiomas. (4) Graphic designers [Person 1 behind easel that is black with red dots on it, looked at by Person 5 with short hair.] PERSON 5: No, those are vermillion, or maybe jasper. Can I see your color settings?

Little Red Dots

xkcd.com/3212/

The Kids Trump Sent to ICE’s Dilley Detention Center ProPublica went inside the immigrant detention center for families in Dilley, Texas. Children held there told us about the anguish of being ripped from their lives in the United States and the fear of...

We obtained the Dilley detention center’s 911 call logs.

Among them are pleas for help for toddlers having trouble breathing, a pregnant woman who passed out and an elementary-school-aged girl having seizures.

PMR 1, the Cranium Nebula, seen with JWST's NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera). Look at the interior structure and the outer, expanding shell!

The Cranium Nebula, seen with JWST's MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) camera. Compared with the NIRCam image, the interior structure is less well defined, but dust is better resolved.

Two new #JWST images of the Cranium Nebula, one in the near-infrared (left) and one in the mid-infrared (right).

The Cranium Nebula (or PMR 1) is 5,000 lightyears away. JWST's imaging capabilities reveal the intricate structure of shells of material being ejected from a dying star.

Thank you @gizmodo.com for covering this illegal actions by OMB. Full article: gizmodo.com/white-house-...

Someone has sure already made this observation but the fact they can convert all those empty warehouses into prison camps means they could have converted them into housing, community centers, job training centers or, hell, libraries or schools all along. It’s always a matter of will not resources.

We can look in shock at what was said & done a decade ago, but similar things are probably happening right now, and possibly right under our noses too - as wealthy individuals are becoming increasingly part of the science funding ecosystem for universities.

Indigenous communities raise concerns over heightened ICE actions across the country As immigration enforcement expands nationwide, Native families say increased ICE activity is creating fear in their communities, even among U.S. citizens and tribal members.

Indigenous communities nationwide are increasingly reporting encounters with immigration agents, including detention — despite them being U.S. citizens and members of sovereign tribal nations.

This x 10^6

Wow. 🤯

RFK Jr. made promises to get his job as health secretary. He's broken many of them In his confirmation hearings, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told U.S. senators that he would not cut funding for vaccine research or change the nation's official vaccine recommendations. He did both.

In his confirmation hearings, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told U.S. senators that he would not cut funding for vaccine research or change the nation's official vaccine recommendations. He did both. n.pr/46QDn9p

1/ ProPublica collected handwritten letters in mid-January from children held at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, the same facility where 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos was taken.

Hundreds of kids are still detained.

We’ll let the children’s words speak for themselves. 🧵

Renee Good's partner addresses Minneapolis immigration crackdown one month after killing Becca Good has seldom spoken out since Renee Good was shot and killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis on Jan. 7.

“Renee was not the first person killed, and she was not the last,” Becca Good said. “You know my wife’s name and you know Alex’s name, but there are many others in this city being harmed that you don’t know — their families are hurting just like mine, even if they don’t look like mine.”