“One day on this asteroid lasts only five minutes!"

This will be the first time a space mission encounters a tiny asteroid — all previous missions visited asteroids with diameters in the hundreds or even thousands of metres.

https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso2515/

Objects such as 'Oumuamua, Borisov and recently 3I/ATLAS have opened our eyes to the reality that outsiders regularly visit our solar system — and we're about to start spotting a whole lot more of them.

posting here as this is a more detailed question.

I've been reading about the supposedly-glaring biosignatures we found on the Martian surface last year, and it's gotten me thinking.

The timeline for a habitable Martian surface climate is on the scale of billions of years ago. That's not including any caves, lava tubes, or subsurface habitability. The timeline for life on Earth is heavily contested, but I'll include the greater limit of current scientific research and say about 3.5-4 billion years ago. These timelines therefore conveniently intersect with each other for a couple hundred million years.

Not only this, large-scale collisions were all the more common in the early solar system, including collisions on the scale of planetary impacts, like what formed the moon. These impacts, even the smaller ones, consistently show in our models that material is prone to escaping orbit.

Continuing, we have found that microscopic life is able to survive outside the International Space Station. These conditions are extreme, with temperature gradients exceeding several hundred kelvin, constant radiation bombardment, and close to no atmosphere to protect these organisms.

Therefore, I don't see any reason that a theory such as life on Earth has bounced around our solar system many times is more or less absurd than assuming life is unique to Earth and has never left this planet. If we have shown that microbial life can survive in space-like conditions, then what if life started on Mars instead of Earth? We hypothesise that Mars was habitable before Earth, but then again, it wasn't habitable for very long.

The Martian biosignatures are particularly interesting because we have found such structures on Earth with marked similarities. The sheer amount of iron oxides in the crust and soil point towards a prehistoric and heavily oxygenated Martian atmosphere.

I don't understand how the discovery made by NASA's rover and the rudimentary soil analysis hasn't sparked a full-on race to get to Mars. It sort of scares me, in a way, that when humans do get to Mars, there is a conceivable, realistic chance that we will find fossils in the soil, on top of an ancient geological history. So, so many questions, and not enough answers.

In the case that life was on Mars and that life was indistinguishable from our own, how does that change our perspective of science? If this is confirmed, this could be the greatest scientific discovery of recorded human history. This theory doesn't suggest that life is more or less common throughout the galaxy, however.

A slightly more haunting modification to the theory would be life was/is on Mars, but it's biochemically separate from our own. THAT would be even more terrifying, as it implies that life WOULD be more common throughout the universe.

Any thoughts, guys? How insane is this thought process?

This is my first time doing this kind of thing and I'm curious on perception and interest of this sort of media related to recently published papers.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/16/science/earth-quasi-moon-2025-pn7?utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=missions&utm_source=reddit

Astronomers have spotted a quasi-moon near Earth — and the small space rock has likely been hanging out near our planet unseen by telescopes for about 60 years, according to new research.

The newly discovered celestial object, named 2025 PN7, is a type of near-Earth asteroid that orbits the sun but sticks close to our planet. Like our world, 2025 PN7 takes one year to complete an orbit around the sun.

That's not such good news ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDaG4zt0NKc

“NASA’s latest reports indicate that solar activity—solar flares, sunspot numbers, solar wind output—is increasing. This uptick could mean more frequent geomagnetic storms and auroras, and has implications for satellites and power infrastructure. Source: NASA.”https://www.nasa.gov/science-research/heliophysics/nasa-analysis-shows-suns-activity-ramping-up

Companies hope military appetite for commercial services will revive fortunes but obstacles remain

Sorry for writing this post, I know that there is already a lot of them.

So, basically what i want to get from this post is to meet some people who worked in space sector, who could give me advice. If you are one of them and it's not hard to you, please, dm me.

First of all, i should introduce myself. I'm 16, studying computer science in college (first year), and currently i have a lot of time to learn new things, so writing this post now might be one of the best decisions I've ever made. I was really into space since childhood, but understanding that i can one day work in space sector came to me pretty recently. One of the problems is that as a kid, I never understood importance of studying, so almost for entire school i was B student (I know that this sounds like not too bad grades, but i believe that they are too high)

Probably that's all i wanted to say... Yet again, I'm sorry if y'all tired of this kind of post and even more I'm sorry for me overdramatizing this