The Artemis II astronauts are coming back to life on Earth, but we’re still not tired of hearing about their amazing journey. There’s a new PBS documentary now streaming on YouTube that highlights the Artemis program and the latest efforts to send humans back to the Moon. Also this week, NASA shared some amazing photos of a comet flying toward the Sun, the nonprofit American Rivers released its annual report on the most endangered rivers in America and ESA posted an old image of Mars to highlight some interesting changes on the surface. Here are the science stories that caught our attention this week.
A comet passes very close to the Sun
Earlier this month, a recently discovered comet came close to the sun – but it couldn’t stand the heat. NASA has shared incredible photos of the April 4 encounter, which shows the comet blasting dust as it orbits our star. As NASA wrote in a social media post, it was “its first and last observation of the Sun.”
The comet, C/2026 A1 (also known as MAPS), was first observed on January 13 this year. As it approached the Sun, it was observed by several instruments: NASA and ESA’s SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) spacecraft, NASA’s STEREO (Solar Terrestrial Relation Observatory) and NASA’s PUNCH (polarimeter to unify the corona and heliosphere). This allowed its passage to be seen from multiple angles. Seen in a narrow-field coronagraph view captured by SOHO, the comet appears to fall directly into the Sun. But, a detailed view from NASA’s Stereo shows that it is actually moving around the Sun before it breaks up.
MAPS was one of a family of comets aptly called the Creutz sungrazing comets, and according to Carl Battams, principal investigator of SOHO’s coronagraph, its destruction likely occurred several hours before its closest approach.
Potomac named America’s most endangered river
Nonprofit conservation organization American Rivers has released its 2026 report on the nation’s most endangered rivers, and data centers play a major role in its top choice status. According to American Rivers, the Potomac River is among the most endangered in the US due to both the threat of sewage pollution from aging pipe systems and the “unprecedented increase in data center development” in its vicinity.
The Potomac River Basin extends across parts of Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, and Washington, DC. In January, the catastrophic failure of the Potomac Interceptor wastewater pipe in Montgomery County, Maryland spilled millions of gallons of untreated sewage into the Potomac River and the Chesapeake and Ohio (C&O) Canal, causing bacteria levels at locations closest to the incident to be 4,000 times the safe recreational limit, according to reports. The Potomac Interceptor is more than 60 years old, and is one of several interceptors in the region with a service life of 50 years or more, notes American Rivers.
Additionally, data center growth is skyrocketing in places like Virginia and Maryland, which could put a strain on local water and energy sources. The data centers are also likely to cause further pollution in the river.
“The region currently has more than 300 data centers and is on track to build a total of 1,000 centers, occupying approximately 200 million square feet of buildings – enough to cover 3,472 football fields on an estimated 20,000 acres of land,” the report states. “These facilities pose a significant and growing threat to both water quality and water quantity, yet they are being approved without meaningful transparency, regulatory review, and assessment of cumulative impacts.”
The organization is calling on Congress to reauthorize infrastructure funding bills to allow aging systems to be upgraded, and for regulators in these states to require comprehensive environmental assessments as well as transparency about the resource use of data centers before approving development plans.
Mars ash: then vs now
The European Space Agency this week shared a look at how a region on Mars has changed since it was observed by NASA’s Viking orbiters in 1976. New images taken by ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft show how dark volcanic ash has encroached upon a swath of land in an area known as the Utopia Planitia Basin. If you head over to the blog post, you’ll find a side-by-side comparison of images from the two time periods.
ESA says this is a rare example of change on the surface of the Red Planet in such a short period of time. The agency explains, “There are two possible explanations for the spread of ash over the past 50 years: either it has been picked up and carried around by Martian winds, or the ocher dust that previously covered the dark ash has been blown away.”
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