📌 TOPINDIATOURS Update ai: NASA Reportedly Shutting Down Its Largest Library, Thro

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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📌 TOPINDIATOURS Eksklusif ai: Scientists Announce Results After Scanning 3I/ATLAS

In July, researchers using the NASA-funded Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System survey telescope in Chile made an exceedingly rare discovery: a mysterious object passing through the solar system at far too high a speed to be bound by the Sun’s gravity.

The object, which has since been dubbed 3I/ATLAS — the third interstellar object ever found passing through our solar system — has fascinated the astronomy community ever since. And despite a wealth of data suggesting it’s a natural comet with an icy core or nucleus and a bright cloud of gas and dust, or coma, Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb has maintained that there’s a chance we could be looking at an alien artefact sent by an extraterrestrial civilization.

While Loeb himself has admitted that the probability of 3I/ATLAS being technological nature is getting lower the more we learn, scientists are still probing the mysterious object for any signs of life.

As the visitor made its closest approach to Earth, coming within just 167 million miles on December 19, an international team of researchers from the alien-hunting astronomy project Breakthrough Listen pointed the Green Bank Telescope — the largest single-dish radio telescope in the world — at 3I/ATLAS.

In a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper, they revealed sobering — albeit probably expected — results: the telescope failed to detect any “candidate signals” emanating from 3I/ATLAS on the day before it made its closest approach to Earth.

“No artificial radio emission localized to 3I/ATLAS was detected” by the Green Bank Telescope, as the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute (SETI) noted on its website.

“In summary, 3I/ATLAS continues to behave as expected from natural astrophysical processes,” it goes on. “That said, it remains an extremely interesting target for observation given the overall rarity of interstellar objects.”

The Breakthrough Listen researchers concluded in their paper that “3I/ATLAS exhibits mostly typical cometary characteristics, including a coma and an unelongated nucleus.”

“There is currently no evidence to suggest that [interstellar objects] are anything other than natural astrophysical objects,” the paper reads. “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.”

For his part, Loeb continues to painstakingly document “anomalies” displayed by the rare visitor, from its unusually large suspected size to its strangely fine-tuned trajectory that brought and will bring it within just tens of millions of miles from Mars, Venus, and Jupiter.

But considering the wealth of data suggesting 3I/ATLAS is nothing more than a massive snowball largely composed of carbon dioxide and water ice, the chances that we’re looking at an alien probe sent to us from a different star system are clearly starting to dwindle.

Wouldn’t it be in an extraterrestrial civilization’s best interest to reach out to us during its probe’s closest approach? Earth certainly is giving up its fair share of radio transmissions, making our planet stand out like a sore thumb in an otherwise lifeless expanse, at least as far as we know it today.

Loeb, for one, has come up with his own “Loeb scale” to quantify how likely it is for an interstellar object to be alien in nature, where zero denotes a natural icy rock, and ten denotes a confirmed piece of alien tech.

As of shortly after it was first discovered, Loeb ranked 3I/ATLAS as a four on his scale. He has since declined to update the ranking until “new data from the period bracketing its closest approach to Earth is publicly released and analyzed” — a process that could drag on for months.

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

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