NASA has approved two missions to explore the Sun and the system that drives space weather near Earth. These two missions are Extreme Ultraviolet High-Throughput Spectroscopic Telescope Epsilon Mission, or EUVST, and the Electrojet Zeeman Imaging Explorer, or EZIE.

Together, NASA’s contribution to the missions will help us understand the Sun and Earth as an interconnected system, the US space agency said on Tuesday.

Understanding the physics that drive the solar wind and solar explosions—including solar flares and coronal mass ejections—could one day help scientists predict these events, which can impact human technology and explorers in space. “We are very pleased to add these new missions to the growing fleet of satellites that are studying our Sun-Earth system using an amazing array of unprecedented observational tools,” Thomas Zurbuchen, Associate Administrator for Science at NASA headquarters in Washington, said in a statement. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) leads the Extreme Ultraviolet High-Throughput Spectroscopic Telescope (EUVST) Epsilon Mission (Solar-C EUVST Mission), along with other international partners.

Targeted for launch in 2026, EUVST is a solar telescope that will study how the solar atmosphere releases solar wind and drives eruptions of solar material.

Indian-origin chemist finds new clue to how life began on Earth

Adding a fresh viewpoint to the origin of life on Earth, an Indian-origin researcher Ramanarayanan Krishnamurthy from Scripps Research in California has made a discovery that a DNA-RNA mix began the first life form on our planet.

Krishnamurthy demonstrated that a simple compound called diamidophosphate (DAP), which was plausibly present on Earth before life arose, could have chemically knitted together tiny DNA building blocks called deoxynucleosides into strands of primordial DNA. The newly described chemical reaction could have assembled DNA building blocks before life forms and their enzymes existed.

The finding, published in a chemistry journal ‘Angewandte Chemie’, is the latest in a series of discoveries, pointing to the possibility that DNA and its close chemical cousin RNA arose together as products of similar chemical reactions, and that the first self-replicating molecules – the first life forms on Earth – were mixes of the two.