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Today's topics:

NASA's EVE exoplanet mission - NASA is studying a proposed EVE mission to probe the mysterious exoplanet 'radius valley,' where planets between Earth and Neptune size are strangely rare, by tracking how stellar radiation strips planetary atmospheres. Keywords: NASA, EVE mission, exoplanets, radius valley, atmospheric escape.[6][14][26]

NASA shifts space station strategy - A new analysis of NASA's Ignition strategy shows the agency pivoting to build its own core space station module and inviting companies to attach commercial segments, reshaping plans for life in low Earth orbit after the ISS retires. Keywords: NASA Ignition, commercial space stations, low Earth orbit, ISS transition, space policy.[44][33]

MAVEN Mars orbiter declared lost - NASA has officially ended the MAVEN Mars mission after determining the aging orbiter is unrecoverable following a loss of contact, closing an 11-year campaign that transformed our understanding of how Mars lost much of its atmosphere. Keywords: MAVEN, Mars atmosphere, mission end, NASA, planetary climate.[31][31]

ISS Crew-11 returns early - The four-person Crew-11 team has returned from the International Space Station about a month earlier than planned due to a medical concern with one astronaut, with officials stressing that everyone appears in good condition. Keywords: Crew-11, ISS, medical issue, early return, NASA.[13][13][16]

Solar storm heading toward Earth - A new coronal mass ejection launched from the Sun on June 11 is expected to give Earth a glancing blow around June 14, potentially boosting auroral activity but unlikely to cause major disruptions. Keywords: solar flare, coronal mass ejection, space weather, aurora, geomagnetic storm.[37][47][48]

Episode Transcript

NASA's EVE exoplanet mission
First up, that mystery about the missing planets.

Astronomers have noticed for years that when you look at the thousands of planets we have discovered around other stars, there is a puzzling gap in sizes between about one and a half and two times the radius of Earth, a pattern known as the exoplanet “radius valley.”[6][14][26] We see plenty of rocky worlds a bit larger than Earth and many mini-Neptunes wrapped in thick gas, but far fewer in the middle than models originally predicted.[14][26] A new piece at Universe Today highlights NASA’s proposed Extreme Ultraviolet Explorer, or EVE, a mission concept designed to attack this problem head-on by watching how high-energy radiation from stars can strip away the atmospheres of close-orbiting planets over time.[6]

The idea is that some planets may have started out as small Neptunes but had their gaseous envelopes blasted off by intense stellar ultraviolet light, leaving behind bare rocky cores that end up looking more like super-Earths.[6][14] By precisely measuring the extreme ultraviolet output of many stars, EVE would help scientists estimate how aggressively those stars erode planetary atmospheres, and therefore how planets migrate from one category into