More than half of states in the U.S. have now reported cases of a dangerous fungus, according to a new study. 

The fungus, Candida auris, is a form of yeast that spreads easily and can infect wounds, ears and the bloodstream. 

Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published Monday in the Annals of Internal Medicine found that Candida auris, also known as C. auris, is spreading at an alarming rate. 

The emerging fungus is considered an urgent antimicrobial resistance threat that researchers have said has been spreading at an alarming rate in health care facilities.

CDC SAYS CASES OF LETHAL FUNGUS TRIPLED IN RECENT YEARS

Cases of the fungus that were resistant to antifungal medicine have tripped over just three years.

The agency says that the fungus is often resistant to multiple antifungal drugs, spreads easily in healthcare facilities and can cause severe infections with high death rates. 

Based on information from a limited number of patients, 30-60% percent of people with C. auris infections have died, but many also had other serious illnesses that increased their risk of death. 

In general, it is not a threat to healthy people, per the CDC, but people who are very sick, have invasive medical devices or have long or frequent stays in healthcare facilities are at increased risk for acquiring C. auris. 

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"The rapid rise and geographic spread of cases is concerning and emphasizes the need for continued surveillance, expanded lab capacity, quicker diagnostic tests, and adherence to proven infection prevention and control," CDC epidemiologist Dr. Meghan Lyman, lead author of the paper, said in a statement. 

C. auris has spread in the U.S. since it was first reported in 2016, and clinical cases have increased annually. The most rapid rise occurred from 2020 to 2021, with the timing and findings from public health investigations suggesting the spread may have worsened due to strain on health care and public health systems during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Case counts may have also increased due to enhanced efforts to detect cases, as well as poor generation infection prevention and control practices.

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While many of the first U.S. cases were infections from abroad, now most infections are spread within the U.S. Doctors have also detected the fungus on the skin of thousands of other patients, making them a transmission risk to others.

Symptoms of infection include fever and chills that don't improve after antibiotic treatment for a suspected bacterial infection.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope team released dazzling new images of two star-studded clusters light-years away. 

The globular cluster Messier 14, or M14, is home to more than 150,000 stars. 

A busy image, it is located 29,000 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Ophiuchus. 

According to NASA, in the summer of 1938, M14 played host to a nova, which is an extraordinarily rare event in a cluster of its kind. 

NEW STAR-STUDDED HUBBLE IMAGE SHOWS GLOBULAR STAR CLUSTER ABOUT 20,000 LIGHT-YEARS AWAY

"A nova is a sudden stellar eruption where, in just a few days, a star’s brightness increases by a factor of 10,000," NASA explains. "Then over the following months the outburst fades away and the star returns to its normal brightness."

In a second image, Messier 7 is visible, located next to the stinger of the constellation Scorpius. 

Located about 980 light-years from Earth, astronomers say that M7 is an "easy naked-eye target for stargazers in southern latitudes."

Second-century astronomer Claudius Ptolemy first recorded this open star cluster in 130 AD, leading to the nickname Ptolemy's Cluster. It likely formed about 220 million years ago.

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It's one of more than a thousand open clusters in the Milky Way and contains about 80 stars.

"If you’re in the northern hemisphere, this is an ideal time of year to spot cosmic objects from the Messier Catalog in the night sky – like the sparkling star cluster M7, seen in this new Hubble image!" the Hubble team tweeted. 

French astronomer Charles Messier added the M7 cluster to his catalog in May 1764.

The Messier Catalog is a resource that includes many astronomical sights from the Northern Hemisphere.

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The team previously shared an image of a globular star cluster, Messier 55, about 20,000 light-years away. That was first spotted by Messier in 1752.

Only a portion of the globular cluster appears in the image, with the cluster stretching about 100 light-years in diameter.

Astronomy fanatics may be in for a treat this Saturday as an estimated 200-foot asteroid is expected to "zip" past Earth in about half the distance from the surface of the planet to the Moon, according to a report.

EarthSky.org, a website that specializes in science-based reporting about the cosmos reported that asteroid 2023 DZ2 will make its closest approach to Earth on March 25 at about 3:52 p.m. EDT at a speed of 17,403 miles per hour.

But even though that may seem really fast on Earth, when looking at objects in space it may not appear that fast. Instead, it will likely look like a star moving slowly across the sky.

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DZ2 was discovered in February by astronomers at the La Palma observatory in the Canary Islands, Spain.

The asteroid’s near-Earth approach this week has no chance of hitting earth, but it will give astronomers and specialists a close view of the object to get a better understanding of it and its orbit.

In fact, the space rock is expected to make another Earthly approach on March 27, 2026, according to NASA, and has a 1-in-38,000,000 chance of striking our planet.

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Once astronomers view the object this weekend and process lots of calculations, that likelihood could change.

The close approach will also give scientists a better idea of the asteroid’s size, which could be anywhere from 43-95 meters, or 141-312 feet, in diameter.

Asteroid DZ2, EarthSky.org reported, is a member of the Apollo family of asteroids and orbits the sun every 3.16 years.

The meteor that exploded over Russia’s Ural Mountains in Chelyabinsk in February 2013 was about 49 feet wide and weight 10 tons. When it entered the atmosphere, it was moving at about 33,000 mph and shattered into pieces about 18-32 miles above the ground, injuring 1,100 people (mostly from flying glass.)

In 2018, the 2018 GE3 asteroid was discovered just one day before it skimmed past Earth in a "surprise" flyby. 2018 GE3 was estimated to be 119,500 miles from Earth’s atmosphere at its closest point and had a diameter of 131 to 328 feet.

The asteroids that make up the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter can measure about 580 miles across, so 2018 GE3 and 2023 DZ2 are small in comparison.

An eruption on the Sun last week blasted material toward Earth, striking the third rock from the center of the solar system with debris, according to NASA.

NASA reported that a coronal mass ejection, or CME, of solar material was detected on the Sun on March 12 at about 11:30 p.m.

The eruption was on the opposite side of the Sun from Earth and is relieved to have come from a former active region called AR3234.

NEW STAR-STUDDED HUBBLE IMAGE SHOWS GLOBULAR STAR CLUSTER ABOUT 20,000 LIGHT-YEARS AWAY

Between February and early March, the active region was Earth-facing and released what NASA called, "Intense M-class flares and one powerful X-class flare."

An M-class solar flare are considered medium-size and have the potential to cause brief radio blackouts, while X-class flares are considered major events that can trigger world-wide radio blackouts.

NASA said its Moon to Mars Space Weather Office conducted an analysis and determined the CME was moving at 1,321 miles per second, or 2,127 kilometers per second. Because of such fast speeds, NASA classified the CME with an R, for rare.

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NASA said it suspects the eruption struck the Parker Solar Probe "head-on," as it is approaching its 15th closest encounter with the Sun, coming within 5.3 million miles of it last Friday.

The day after the CME was pushed out of the Sun, the probe relayed a green beacon tone signifying it was in its nominal operation mode. Scientists are waiting for the next data download to learn more about the CME event, which NASA said will happen after the spacecraft’s close approach with the Sun.

This CME is what NASA calls a halo because it appears to spread from the sun in a ring shape around the Sun. Depending on the observer’s position, halo CMEs occur when the solar dispersion is aligned toward or away from Earth.

"Even though the CME erupted from the opposite side of the Sun, its impacts were felt at Earth," NASA said. "As CMEs blast through space, they create a shockwave that can accelerate particles along the CME’s path to incredible speeds, much the way surfers are pushed along by an incoming ocean wave."

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NASA is still analyzing the event to learn more about its far-reaching effects.

As the smallest of the group of baleen whales that includes the blue whale - filter-feeding behemoths of the marine realm - the Antarctic minke whale aptly can be called the littlest giant. It also has been among the most enigmatic of the baleen whales, owing to its remote and frigid domain.

New research provides a fuller understanding of this species, focusing on a foraging behavior called lunge-feeding that it shares with the other members of its cetacean group, the rorqual whales. It showed that the Antarctic minke whale, reaching a maximum of about 26 feet long, has the smallest possible body size to capture enough prey to survive using this feeding strategy.

"This answers a previously unknown question of why all filter-feeding whales are big, and why there are not, for instance, dolphin-sized baleen whales," said Stanford University marine biologist Dave Cade, lead author of the study published this week in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.

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"This then has implications for how this feeding style evolved - animals must have attained a large size before the unique behavior of lunge-feeding evolved. Once lunge-feeding evolved, it enabled the evolution of the largest animals of all time," Cade said.

All the rorqual whales - the blue, fin, sei, Bryde's, minke and humpback - feed by accelerating rapidly, opening their mouths and engulfing a large volume of seawater containing prey such as shrimp-like krill and tiny fish. They push the water through baleen plates made of keratin - the substance found in people's fingernails - to sieve out the prey.

The repeated lunging requires a high investment of energy, and the efficiency of foraging this way favors a larger body size. The ability to engulf a huge volume of water is crucial to making this feeding strategy work. Blue whales, which can reach about 98 feet long, can engulf water equivalent to 135% of their body mass. The figure is 42% for their much-smaller cousins, the minke whales.

"They are the smallest of the largest," University of California, Santa Cruz ocean sciences professor and study co-author Ari Friedlaender said of minke whales.

Because of their remote habitat and secretive nature, there has been a lack of information on the species, Friedlaender added.

During trips aboard U.S. National Science Foundation research ships, the researchers obtained data on 23 minke whales as the marine mammals foraged around the Antarctic Peninsula, tracking their movement and obtaining video of their feeding using noninvasive suction tags placed on them while also gauging the amount of krill in the water.

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The feeding rates of the whales were up to four times higher at night, when krill come closer to the surface, than during daytime, when krill generally stay at greater depths.

After calculating the energy use of the whales during foraging and their food intake needs based on their body size, the researchers determined that this species was right at the threshold of having lunge-feeding still work.

Some other baleen whales feed differently than the rorquals. The right and bowhead whales are "ram filter-feeders," slowly swimming through prey-laden water with their mouths open. Gray whales obtain prey at the sea bottom.

The minke whale, with a sleek body with a brownish-grey color, feeds in the ice-covered or nearshore waters around Antarctica and migrates to more temperate or tropical climates to breed. The study involved one of the world's two minke whale species, the other being the common mink whale. Minke whales and the nearly extinct pygmy right whale are the smallest of all the baleen whales. Many of the toothed whales are much smaller.

"They are indeed unique," Cade said, "and provide kind of a living fossil, showing what the first animals to develop lunge-feeding, which were approximately minke-sized, must have looked like and acted like."

A new Hubble Space Telescope image shows Messier 55, also known as M55, about 20,000 light-years away. 

The loosely concentrated globular star cluster is large and bright, but lacks a dense core and many of its stars are faint. 

It is difficult to observe in non-optimal conditions – even when it was first spotted in 1752 by French astronomer Charles Messier. 

It took until 1778 for him to catalog M55. 

WEBB TELESCOPE CAPTURES STUNNING IMAGE OF STAR ON CUSP OF SUPERNOVA 15K LIGHT-YEARS AWAY

Although only a portion of the globular cluster appears in the image, the cluster stretches about 100 light-years in diameter. 

The cluster as a whole appears spherical, because the stars' intense gravitational attraction pulls them together. 

While the view is hampered by a thicker layer of atmosphere, water vapor and light pollution for northern observers, the telescope's view resolves individual stars in this cluster. 

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Ground-based telescopes can also resolve individual stars in M55, but fewer stars are visible.

While M55 contains an estimated 100,000 stars with 55 variable stars, even in skies with low light pollution and viewed with binoculars the cluster will appear as a round hazy patch. 

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"Small telescopes can begin to resolve individual stars in M55, while larger aperture telescopes will pick out low magnitude stars easily," said NASA. 

The star cluster is found in the southern part of the constellation Sagittarius.

Scientists have created baby mice with two fathers for the first time. 

They turned male mouse stem cells into female cells in a lab. 

The work was described in a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature. 

The researchers took skin cells from the tails of male mice and converted them into "induced pluripotent stem cells," which have the ability to develop into many different types of cells or tissues. 

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Next, by growing and treating the male stem cells with a drug, they were turned into female cells and produced functional egg cells. 

Those eggs were fertilized, and the scientists implanted the embryos into female mice. 

About 1% of the embryos grew into live mouse pups that appeared to grow normally and became parents themselves, research leader Katsuhiko Hayashi of Kyushu University and Osaka University in Japan told fellow scientists at the Third International Summit on Human Genome Editing last week.

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In commentary published alongside the study, Diana Laird, a stem cell and reproductive expert at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the research, said the work "opens up new avenues in reproductive biology and fertility research" for animals and people. 

"And it might even provide a template for enabling more people," such as male same-sex couples, "to have biological children, while circumventing the ethical and legal issues of donor eggs," she and colleague Jonathan Bayerl said. 

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They also raised several cautions, including that the technique is extremely inefficient. They also stressed that it’s still too early to know if the protocol would work in human stem cells at all. And Laird highlighted that scientists need to be mindful of the mutations and errors that may be introduced in a culture dish before using stem cells to make eggs.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

NASA scientists have seen direct geological evidence of active volcanism on Venus for the first time ever. 

The recent volcanic activity was discovered after examining radar images of Earth's twin taken more than 30 years ago by NASA's Magellan mission. 

The images revealed a volcanic vent changing shape and increasing in size over the period of less than a year. 

"NASA’s selection of the VERITAS mission inspired me to look for recent volcanic activity in Magellan data," University of Alaska Fairbanks research professor Robert Herrick, who led the search of the archival data, said in a statement. "I didn’t really expect to be successful, but after about 200 hours of manually comparing the images of different Magellan orbits, I saw two images of the same region taken eight months apart exhibiting telltale geological changes caused by an eruption."

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The VERITAS (Venus Emissivity, Radio science, InSAR, Topography And Spectroscopy) mission will launch within a decade, sending an orbiter to study Venus from surface to core. 

The geological changes found occurred in the Alta Regio, a highland region near the planet's equator which is home to the Ozza Mons and Maat Mons volcanoes.

While the region was long believed to be volcanically active, there was no direct evidence of the recent activity. 

OUTER SHELL OF VENUS MAY BE RESURFACING THE PLANET, NASA SAYS

The search and its results were published in a study in the journal Science.

While looking at Magellan radar images, Herrick identified a volcanic vent associated with Maat Mons that changed significantly between February and October 1991.

In the February image, the vent appeared nearly circular and showed signs of drained lava down its exterior slopes. Eight months later, the same vent had become misshapen and was filled to the rim with a lava lake. After teaming up with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Scott Hensley – who is the project scientist for VERITAS – the researchers created computer models, concluding that only an eruption could have been responsible for the change.

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"Only a couple of the simulations matched the imagery, and the most likely scenario is that volcanic activity occurred on Venus’ surface during Magellan’s mission," said Hensley. "While this is just one data point for an entire planet, it confirms there is modern geological activity."

NASA partnered with Axiom Space to unveil the spacesuits that astronauts will one day wear when humanity establishes a longtime presence on the moon. 

The spacesuits are designed for NASA's Artemis III mission, which is scheduled to land humans near the moon's south pole some time in 2025. 

The lunar surface is an unforgiving place, with temperatures reaching 130 degrees during sunlit periods near the south pole. In other deep craters that are perpetually dark, temperatures can dive as low as -334 degrees. 

The new spacesuit debuted by Axiom on Wednesday will allow humans not only to walk on the moon, but also to live and work there. 

"Axiom Space’s Artemis III spacesuit will be ready to meet the complex challenges of the lunar south pole and help grow our understanding of the Moon in order to enable a long-term presence there," Axiom Space CEO Michael Suffredini said Wednesday. 

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The sleek black outer layer sporting Axiom's logo is just a cover to protect the suit’s proprietary design. The actual suits that astronauts will wear on the moon need to be white to reflect heat instead of absorb it. 

NASA is still reviewing data from its uncrewed Artemis I test flight last year, which sent the Orion spacecraft around the moon before successfully returning to Earth in December. 

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Artemis II, which will be the first crewed mission to orbit the moon, is set to launch in late 2024. The crewed mission that will land on the moon, Artemis III, is scheduled for 2025. 

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has captured the rare phase of a star nearing death. 

An image of the super bright, massive Wolf-Rayet star, known as WR 124, was captured in June of last year – one of the first observations made by the $10 billion-dollar observatory using its infrared instruments. 

The Wolf-Rayet phase is a fleeting stage that only some stars go through, soon before they explode. The stars in that phase are in the process of casting off their outer later, resulting in halos of gas and dust. 

The star is located 15,000 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius.

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It is 30 times the mass of the sun and has shed 10 suns' worth of material thus far. 

Dust is particularly interesting to astronomers because it shelters forming stars, forms planets and serves as a platform for molecules to form and clump together. Notably, the universe is operating with a dust budget surplus.

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Cosmic dust is best observed in infrared wavelengths of light and Webb's Near-Infrared Camera, or NIRCam, balances the brightness of WR 124’s stellar core and the knotty details in the fainter surrounding gas. The telescope's Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) reveals the structure of the gas and dust nebula of the ejected material now surrounding the star. 

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Furthermore, stars like WR 124 help scientists understand a crucial period in the early history of the universe when similarly dying stars first seeded the young universe with heavy elements forged in their cores.

The European Space Agency said Tuesday that the chances a newly-discovered asteroid will hit Earth in 2046 have dipped.

This comes after NASA revealed the asteroid, called 2023 DW, could hit Earth on Valentine's Day in 2046, although the odds were already slim. The asteroid is estimated to be about the size of a 50-meter Olympic swimming pool.

Last week, NASA's risk scale ranked the odds of the asteroid hitting Earth as "extremely unlikely" and said there was "no cause for public concern."

The likelihood that the asteroid hits Earth is even less than the one in 847 previously believed, according to ESA's planetary defense office head Richard Moissl. He told Agence France-Presse, a news outlet in France, that the probability has dropped to one in 1,584.

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"It will go down now with every observation until it reaches zero in a couple of days at the latest," Moissl said on Tuesday. "No one needs to be worried about this guy."

NASA also lowered its odds, reducing the likelihood to one in 770 on Tuesday. This gives the asteroid a 99.87% chance of missing Earth.

"We tend to be a little more conservative, but it definitely appears to now have a downward trend in probability," NASA's planetary defense officer Lindley Johnson told the news outlet.

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Johnson added that new observations often drop the "uncertainty region" where the asteroid will reach its closest point to Earth.

Earth is still inside the uncertainty region, but the probability will temporarily rise until additional observations no longer include Earth and the odds are cut to zero.

In the event that the asteroid does strike Earth in 2046, there would be about a 70% chance it landed in the Pacific Ocean, but it could also hit the U.S., Australia or South-East Asia, Moissl said.

However, some experts say Earth could defend itself if an asteroid does come charging toward the planet. NASA's Dart spacecraft deliberately struck the pyramid-sized asteroid Dimorphos last year, forcing it off course.

NASA's Davide Farnocchia said the Dart mission "gives us confidence that such a mission would be successful" against 2023 DW.

Pentagon officials said in a draft document last week that aliens could be visiting our solar system and releasing smaller probes like missions conducted by NASA when studying other planets.

A draft research report authored by Sean Kirkpatrick, the director of the Pentagon’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) and Abraham Loeb, chairman of Harvard University’s astronomy department was released on March 7 and focuses on the physical constraints of unidentified aerial phenomena.

"...An artificial interstellar object could potentially be a parent craft that releases many small probes during its close passage to Earth, an operational construct not too dissimilar from NASA missions," the report read. "These ‘dandelion seeds’ could be separated from the parent craft by the tidal gravitational force of the Sun or by a maneuvering capability."

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The AARO was established in July 2022 and is responsible for tracking objects in the sky, underwater and in space – or possibly an object that has the ability to move from one domain to the next.

Congress tasked NASA to find 90% of all objects near Earth that are larger than 140 meters in 2005, which resulted in Pan-STARRS telescopes, according to the report.

On October 19, 2017, the Pan-STARRS detected an unusual interstellar object that was later named ‘Oumuamua, or scout in Hawaiian.

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The object was cigar-shaped, appeared flat, and was propelled away from the sun without showing a cometary tail, leading scientists to believe it was artificial.

Three years later, another object was discovered, the report noted, namely NASA’s rocket booster 2020 SO, which had no cometary trail. The report also said six months before ‘Oumuamua made its closest approach to Earth, a meter-sized interstellar meteor, IM2, crashed on earth and exhibited an identical speed relative to the Sun at large distances and an identical shape to ‘Oumuamua.

"With proper design, these tiny probes would reach the Earth or other solar system planets for exploration, as the parent craft passes by within a fraction of the Earth-Sun separation — just like ‘Oumuamua’ did," the authors wrote. "Astronomers would not be able to notice the spray of mini probes because they do not reflect enough sunlight for existing survey telescopes to notice them."

The research paper comes after a month of scrutiny over unidentified flying objects over the U.S. Most notably, a Chinese spy balloon was shot down, only after traversing across the skies over the U.S.

A massive seaweed bloom may be heading toward Florida's Gulf Coast, bringing harmful impacts for humans and marine ecosystems alike. 

Sargassum is a blob of brown seaweed and, at around 5,000 miles wide, the bloom is twice the width of the U.S. 

While the thick mat of macroalgae can provide a habitat for migratory marine life and absorb carbon dioxide, it can also threaten coastal inhabitants. 

The Florida Department of Health notes that it gives off a substance called hydrogen sulfide when it rots. 

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Hydrogen sulfide can irritate the eyes, and residents may have trouble breathing after inhaling it. While the algae itself does not sting or cause rashes, tiny organism like larvae of jellyfish may irritate the skin. 

Do not use sargassum in cooking, as it may contain large amounts of heavy metals like arsenic and cadmium. 

Hydrogen sulfide is not known to cause cancer in humans. However, those who are exposed for a long time in an enclosed space can be impacted. Hydrogen sulfide levels in places like the beach are not expected to harm health. 

People can protect themselves by avoiding touching or swimming near seaweed, using gloves to handle it, closing windows and doors if you live near the beach, and limiting time there if a person has asthma or other respiratory problems. 

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If workers are collecting and transporting the algae, they should wear protective clothing. 

While sargassum provides an important habitat for migratory organisms – including for wildlife in the Sargasso Sea, where it is naturally abundant – the blooms can choke coastal waters, depriving coral of sunlight. 

The red-brown seaweed has piled up on sands, blocking turtles' path to nesting grounds. Last summer, the most immediate threat was to beach tourism.

Scientists began to observe the seaweed in a belt from West Africa to the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico in 2011, according to NASA.

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"This is all ultimately related to climate change, as climate affects precipitation and ocean circulation and even human activities [that can lead to sargassum blooms], but what we’ve shown is that these blooms do not occur because of increased water temperature," Chuanmin Hu, of the USF College of Marine Science, said in a statement. "They are probably here to stay."

Fox News' Bradford Betz contributed to this report.

New research from a group of international climate scientists shows that so-called "zombie viruses" once revived, can infect amoeba cells. 

The study, published in the open journal Viruses, looked at more than a dozen new viruses isolated from seven permafrost samples from ancient Siberia. 

The research built upon previous studies from the past decade that showed a virus – in some cases tens of thousands of years old – could be infectious once revived. 

Researchers from France, Russia, and Germany discovered, through radiocarbon dating of the permafrost, that the viruses had been in a dormant state between 27,000 and 48,500 years. 

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Permafrost is a frozen layer of soil widely found on land and below the ocean floor, particularly in areas where temperatures rarely rise above freezing. It is estimated that around one-quarter of the Northern Hemisphere is covered by permafrost. 

Research has shown permafrost to be an excellent preservative. But scientists worry that as the planet gradually warms and the permafrost melts, viruses capable of infecting humans will emerge. 

"This rapid permafrost thaw causes mobilization of ancient organic matter previously preserved for millennia in permafrost deep layers, a phenomenon most visible in Siberia, where deep continuous permafrost underlays most of the North Eastern territories," the researchers noted. 

Another consequence of melting permafrost, the researchers add, will release organic matter frozen for up to a million years, most of which decomposes into carbon dioxide and methane, further enhancing the greenhouse gas effect. 

NASA's Ingenuity Mars Helicopter snapped a beautiful image of a Martian sunset late last month. 

The helicopter, which recently took off on its 45th flight, used its high-resolution color camera to capture the scene. 

The camera is located in the helicopter's fuselage and was pointed around 22 degrees below the horizon on Feb. 22 – or Sol 714 of the Perseverance rover mission. 

Ingenuity continues to make flights around the red planet's Jezero Crater. 

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It's now well beyond its operational life expectancy. 

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The helicopter arrived at the crater in February 2021 and completed its first flight in April of that year. 

While it was talked with just a few test flights, its role expanded to serve as a scout for the Mars rover. 

Ingenuity has now flown 46 times.

The International Space Station avoided a collision with an Earth observation satellite early Monday. 

NASA said that the ISS Progress 83 resupply ship, which is docked to the orbital laboratory, fired its engines for just over six minutes. The action slightly raised the station's orbit to avoid the satellite. 

"The new orbital trajectory will not impact the upcoming departure of the Crew-5 mission," NASA said. 

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The SpaceX Crew-5 mission will return to Earth, with the company's Dragon spacecraft – named Endurance – unlocking from the ISS at 2:05 a.m. ET on Saturday, March 11. 

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NASA and SpaceX are targeting 9:02 p.m. ET for a splashdown. 

The SpaceX Crew-5 members include NASA astronauts Josh Cassada and Nicole Mann, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Koichi Wakata and Roscosmos cosmonaut Anna Kikina.

The likelihood of the eruption of Alaska's Tanaga volcano, located in the Aleutians, increased over the past two days. 

The Alaska Volcano Observatory said late Thursday that earthquake activity had become more frequent and had continued. The volcano alert level was raised from advisory to watch. 

"Over the past 48 hours, earthquake activity near Tanaga and Takawangha volcanoes has been elevated and continues," it said in a Facebook post. "This sustained activity indicates an increased potential for eruption on Tanaga Island."

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It also raised the advisory for Takawangha volcano. 

"If an eruption were to occur, it is uncertain at this stage if it would come from Tanaga or Takawangha," it added. 

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Analysts are continuing to monitor the situation, including earthquakes under Tanaga Island. The seismic events are occurring at a rate of up to several per minute, with the largest event being a 3.9 magnitude quake under the Tanaga volcano.

No eruptive activity or signs of unrest have been detected in satellite or other monitoring data. Tanaga is monitored with a local seismic network, a single local infrasound sensor, regional infrasound and lightning sensors and satellite imagery.

NASA’s Curiosity rover captured and transmitted images of "sun rays" as the sun dropped below the horizon on Mars last month, which was part of a new cloud-imaging campaign that the rover is part of.

According to NASA, Martian sunsets can be "uniquely moody," which is what makes these new images unique.

The "sun rays" were captured in an illuminated bank of clouds, and this was the first time NASA scientists had seen them so clearly on Mars.

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NASA’s cloud-imaging campaign builds on 2021 observations of night-shining clouds, the space agency said, and while most clouds on Mars hover no more than 37 miles above the surface of the planet and are made of water ice, the clouds in the images sent from the rover appear to be at a higher and colder altitude.

Because the clouds are higher, scientists say they could be made of carbon dioxide ice, or dry ice.

In late January, the rover captured a feather-shaped iridescent cloud after sunset, which was also part of the cloud study.

The feather-shaped cloud image is composed of 28 images captured with the rover’s mast camera, or Mastcam. The images were processed to put emphasis on the highlights, NASA said.

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Scientists hope that by studying where and when clouds form on Mars, they will get a better understanding about the composition of the planet’s atmosphere, including the temperatures and winds within it.

A cloud survey conducted in 2021 included images from the black-and-white navigation cameras and provided a look at the structure of clouds as they moved.

The difference with this study is the Mastcam is providing color images, which show how the cloud particles grow over time, according to NASA.

"Where we see iridescence, it means a cloud’s particle sizes are identical to their neighbors in each part of the cloud," Mark Lemmon, an atmospheric scientist with the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado said in a press release from NASA. "By looking at color transitions, we’re seeing particle size changing across the cloud. That tells us about the way the cloud is evolving and how its particles are changing size over time."

The Curiosity rover was launched on Nov. 26, 2011 and landed on Mars on Aug. 5, 2012. Its mission was to find out whether Mars ever had the right environmental conditions to support life, and early on, the rover discovered chemical and mineral evidence habitable environments from the past.

The Alaska Volcano Observatory raised the alert level to advisory status for Tanaga Volcano on Tuesday following a series of earthquakes. 

"Earthquake activity beneath Tanaga Volcano began to increase slowly starting at about 1:30 p.m. AKST today. At roughly 8:45 p.m. AKST this evening, the activity escalated with earthquakes occurring as often as two or three each minute," the office said in a Facebook post. 

The largest of the quakes have magnitudes between 2.0 and 3.0, with initial locations at shallow depths beneath the volcano's summit. 

"That indicates that we’re seeing significant unrest at the volcano," John Power, a research geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey stationed in Anchorage at the Alaska Volcano Observatory, told The Associated Press.

NORTHERN LIGHTS DAZZLE ALASKA IN COLORFUL DISPLAY SEEN ON VIDEO

"Whether or not this will lead to an eruption is something we can’t say at this point in time," he noted. "But we are concerned about it enough that we have gone and elevated the warning level."

Tanaga Volcano stands at 5,925 feet tall and is located in the western Aleutians. There are no communities are structures there, but Adak is about 65 miles away and could see ash fall. 

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The last known eruption for Tanaga was in 1914. If the volcano were to erupt, the biggest threat would be to aircraft.

"It’s very different than what you would see, for example, in Hawaii, Kilauea or Mauna Loa, where you see these beautiful red rivers of lava flowing down the side of the volcano," Power said.

There are no known eruptions of the Takawangha or Sajaka Volcanoes, which are also on the island. 

However, field work has indicated that eruptions may have occurred from those volcanoes and were attributed to Tanaga.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

A newly-detected asteroid with a diameter of about 161 feet has a "very small chance" of striking Earth on Valentine's Day in 2046, NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office said Wednesday. 

The space rock, dubbed 2023 DW, was first spotted on Feb. 28 and has about a 1-in-625 chance of impacting our planet, according to the latest estimate by the European Space Agency. 

"Often when new objects are first discovered, it takes several weeks of data to reduce the uncertainties and adequately predict their orbits years into the future," NASA tweeted Wednesday. "Orbit analysts will continue to monitor asteroid 2023 DW and update predictions as more data comes in."

It's been about a decade since the last major asteroid impacted Earth, when a roughly 50-foot wide meteor exploded over Russia's Ural Mountains, shattering windows and injuring more than 1,000 people. 

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NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office and other agencies around the world have started tracking near-Earth objects and coming up with a game plan for how to knock a potentially devastating asteroid off its path. 

The first Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) was completed last year, when a "vending machine-sized spacecraft" collided with the asteroid Dimorphos about seven million miles away from Earth, successfully altering its orbit. 

About 48 tons of harmless meteoritic material strikes Earth every day, the large majority of it burning up as it travels through the atmosphere.