MAROKO133 Hot ai: NASA Reportedly Shutting Down Its Largest Library, Throwing Materials Aw

📌 MAROKO133 Eksklusif ai: NASA Reportedly Shutting Down Its Largest Library, Throw

NASA’s budget is still an unfathomable mess. The government shutdown late last year once again delayed proceedings to determine the space agency’s future — but if it were up to the Trump administration, NASA’s science budget would be slashed in half, an “extinction-level” inflection point for US space exploration and science.

If Congress were to have its druthers, on the other hand, NASA’s budget would largely remain unchanged, securing the future of dozens of important missions — both ongoing and planned — that the White House is looking to place on the chopping block.

Trapped between the two, the fate of the space agency remains in the air. Congress passed a short-term resolution on November 12 that left the government until January 31 to ratify NASA’s budget. NASA’s recently sworn-in administrator and former SpaceX space tourist, Jared Isaacman, has yet to officially comment on the matter, though he’s made it clear that he’s aligned with the Trump administration’s tripling down on private industry-led space exploration.

As uncertainty and confusion prevail, though, the Trump administration has taken it upon itself to gut entire buildings at NASA’s iconic Goddard Space Flight Center (GFSC), which played a key role in the development of its groundbreaking James Webb and Hubble space telescopes, alongside countless other key missions.

This week, news emerged that the Trump administration is even shutting down the center’s library — NASA’s largest — and threatening to destroy an undetermined number of books, documents, and journals in the process.

As the New York Times reports, many of these invaluable artifacts haven’t been digitized or made available elsewhere. While a NASA spokesperson told the newspaper that the agency will review what to keep and what to throw away over the next 60 days, it’s a sobering glimpse at a federal agency in crisis.

After the NYT story ran, the agency’s freshly-minted administrator Jared Isaacman pushed back against its claims.

“The [NYT] story does not fully reflect the context NASA shared,” he wrote on X. “At no point is NASA ‘tossing out’ important scientific or historical materials, and that framing has led to several other misleading headlines.”

That claim seems to contradict the NYT, which reported that a NASA spokesman named Jacob Richmond had told it that the agency would “review the library holdings over the next 60 days and some material would be stored in a government warehouse while the rest would be tossed away.”

NASA press secretary Bethany Stevens, meanwhile, described the initiative as a “consolidation, not a closure,” saying the Trump administration is looking to close 13 buildings and more than 100 labs across the GSFC campus by March.

Stevens claimed the latest moves are part of a master plan reorganization effort that was first devised in 2022, several years before president Donald Trump took office. Per the NYT, seven other NASA libraries have already been shuttered since 2022. Three of them were closed in 2025.

In November, NASA staffers raised concerns over word that over a dozen buildings on the GSFC campus were being emptied without notice. It’s not just books and important documents on the line; the staffers warned that highly specialized equipment was at risk of being thrown away like trash as well.

Lawmakers have been furious at the Trump administration’s handling of the situation.

“The Trump Administration has spent the last year attacking NASA Goddard and its workforce and threatening our efforts to explore space, deepen our understanding of Earth, and spur technological advancements that make our economy stronger and nation safer,” senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MA) told the NYT. “These reports of closures at Goddard are deeply concerning — I will continue to push back on any actions that impact Goddard’s critical mission.”

The GSFC library contains important documentation about our efforts to study the cosmos, dating back to the Apollo era over half a century ago.

Critics of the moves to gut the campus argue it would be reckless to abandon these documents.

“It’s not like we’re so much smarter now than we were in the past,” planetary scientist Dave Williams, who took NASA up on its offer for an early retirement last year, told the NYT. “It’s the same people, and they make the same kind of human errors. If you lose that history, you are going to make the same mistakes again.”

Updated with additional context from NASA.

More on NASA: NASA Staff Horrified at Plan to Throw Out Incredibly Specialized Science Equipment Like Garbage

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📌 MAROKO133 Update ai: Scientist Puzzled by “Symmetric Jet Structure” on 3I/ATLAS

It may have made its closest approach to Earth last month, but the mysterious interstellar object 3I/ATLAS continues to fascinate astronomers as it now careens back out of the solar system, never to be seen again.

Recent observations by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have caught the attention of Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb. Images taken in November and December show an “intriguing configuration” of three “evolving jets” that jut out of the object at regular angles from each other, as he explained in a recent blog post.

The object’s most prominent appendage by far is still an “anti-tail” that points directly at the Sun, which scientists suspect is the result of the Sun-facing side losing more of its surface mass as it’s warmed up by the approach. That aligns with the most prevalent theory that 3I/ATLAS is a natural comet largely made up of water and carbon dioxide ice that’s visiting us from a distant star system.

But on a smaller scale, three additional and mysteriously symmetrical jets become apparent in the Hubble observations, which Loeb suggests could be associated with “major pockets of ice on the surface of a rotating nucleus” and “triggered by heat conduction through the body of the nucleus.”

Loeb argues that it’s highly unlikely that the rotation axis of these three jets would be perfectly aligned with the direction of the Sun to allow 3I/ATLAS to form the massive anti-tail jet, which “requires stability over longer periods.”

Put differently, he wrote, how could it be that these three jets are perfectly rotating around a much larger anti-tail jet that acts “like the beam of a lighthouse?”

As such, the astronomer once again raised the possibility that 3I/ATLAS could bean alien remnant of an extraterrestrial civilization — a far-fetched theory he’s championed since the object was first spotted back in July. The theory has largely been refuted by other members of the scientific community, including NASA scientists, who have pointed to the wealth of data suggesting it closely resembles a solar system comet, even despite its interstellar origin.

“Are the symmetric triple-jet inner structure or the unlikely alignment of the rotation axis with the direction of the Sun, technological signatures?” Loeb concluded. “Or can they be a natural outcome of gas dynamics?”

As more data emerges about the rare visitor, scientists continue to chip away at Loeb’s alien hypothesis. Last week, an international team of researchers from the alien-hunting astronomy project Breakthrough Listen detailed in a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper that the Green Bank Telescope, the largest single-dish radio telescope in the world, did not detect any “candidate signals” emerging from 3I/ATLAS as it made its closest approach to our planet on December 19.

In fact, they argued that 3I/ATLAS is even more familiar than ‘Oumuamua — the first confirmed interstellar object that was detected passing through the solar system back in 2017 — which similarly sparked a debate at the time about the possibility of being an alien space object.

“Unlike 1I/’Oumuamua, 3I/ATLAS exhibits mostly typical cometary characteristics, including a coma and an unelongated nucleus,” the researchers wrote. “There is currently no evidence to suggest that [interstellar objects] are anything other than natural astrophysical objects.”

“However, given the small number of such objects known (only three to date), and the plausibility of interstellar probes as a technosignature, thorough study is warranted,” they added.

More on 3I/ATLAS: Scientists Say They’ve Found Another Anomaly About 3I/ATLAS

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