Announcing our new STEP Grant winners: A Solar System shadow-tracker, a new telescope tool, and an asteroid database

Three groups of scientists will receive crowdfunded support to further the scientific exploration of space. The science-journalism coverage adds useful context, while the strongest evidential footing still comes from the underlying data, papers or institutional documentation.

That matters because astronomy does not advance on single detections. The field builds confidence by accumulating independent observations across different wavelengths, instruments and epochs until isolated signals become defensible conclusions. What looks convincing in one dataset can dissolve when a second instrument looks at the same target, and what looks marginal can solidify when follow-up campaigns confirm the original reading. The current standard requires that a result survive this triangulation before the community treats it as settled. Science Review by Bruce Betts, PhD September 21, 2026 Whether searching for extraterrestrial intelligence or building our very own space mission, The Planetary Society has a long. Now, we are announcing the latest winners of our Science and Technology Empowered by the Public (STEP) Grants: three groups of scientists who will receive crowdfunded support for.

They were selected based on their scientific value, achievability, and relevance to The Planetary Society’s core enterprises, exploring worlds, finding life, and defending Earth. Previous STEP Grant winners have explored the possibility of growing plants in space, used rare lakes on Earth to learn about potentially habitable moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

Though Rubin is expected to find tens of thousands of TNOs and other small Solar System worlds, it will not provide detailed measurements of some of their properties, including. To help coordinate this science, a few groups of astronomers regularly publish predictions of which stellar occultations will be happening when.

The coming discoveries from Rubin will far outnumber what could be handled by existing occultation networks. This project funds the expansion of an existing prediction tool, called the Collaborative Occultation Resources and Archive (CORA), to enable it to automatically handle the tens.

What gives the story weight is not just the object itself, but the way the measurement trims the range of plausible physical explanations. Astronomy has accumulated enough cases to know that the most interesting results are rarely the ones that confirm expectations cleanly; they are the ones that confirm some expectations while complicating others, or that open a parameter space that previous instruments could not reach. The scientific community evaluates these contributions by asking whether the new data constrain a model in a way that older data could not, and whether those constraints survive systematic review.

The result will multiply Rubin’s impact, turning initial discoveries into a more detailed understanding of these distant worlds. Katie Breeland-Newcomb (Lowell), Ryan Hamilton (Lowell), Stephen Levine, Maxime Devogele (ESA/NEOCC), Ben Hardesty (Lowell) Nicholas Moskovitz and his team plan to help fix that.

Because this item comes through The Planetary Society as science journalism, it should be treated as contextual reporting rather than primary evidence. Good science reporting can identify why a result matters, connect it to the wider literature and make technical work readable, but the decisive evidence remains in the original paper, dataset, mission release or technical record. That distinction is especially important when a story is later repeated by aggregators, because repetition increases visibility, not evidential strength.

The next step is to see whether other instruments and other wavelengths tell the same story. Campaigns with JWST, the VLT, the forthcoming Extremely Large Telescopes and radio arrays will provide the spectral coverage and spatial resolution needed to move from detection to physical characterization. The timeline for that kind of confirmation is typically measured in years, not months, which is worth keeping in mind when reading the current result.

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