Space News & Blog Articles

The "ice giants" of the Solar System - Uranus and Neptune - remain the least explored of any planets orbiting our Sun. Thanks to the sheer distance between them and Earth, the first probe to ever study them was the Voyager 2 probe, which remains the only mission ever to conduct a flyby. What this probe revealed led to numerous mysteries about both worlds, their systems of moons, and other characteristics. For instance, when Voyager flew past Uranus, it recorded a very strong electron belt of a much higher energy level than expected.

On November 27th, Russia's Baikonur Cosmodrome experienced a severe accident that has suspended Russia's ability to launch payloads and crews to space. Shortly after the Soyuz-MS28 mission launched at 09:27:57 UTC (4:27:57 a.m. EST; 1:27:57 a.m. PST) from Site 31/6 at the launch center, drone footage showed that the 8U216 mobile maintenance cabin was lying upside down in the flame trench. Fortunately, the launch was successful and the crew it carried - cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikayev, and NASA astronaut Christopher Williams - arrived safely at the International Space Station (ISS) a few hours later.

What is “gum”? Most people have probably never considered this question, and might answer something like a chewy material you can put in your mouth. But, to a scientist they might answer something like “nitrogen-rich polymeric sheets”, because precisely defining the chemistry of a material is important to them. Or at least, that’s what they called a type of organic material found in the sample collected of the asteroid Bennu by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. But more informally, scientists have taken to calling it “space gum”, and the process it formed under is making some of them question current models of asteroid formation.

As the Age of Exoplanet Discovery progresses, the search for planets around other stars is becoming more refined. NASA's Kepler and TESS missions were about bulk discovery of exoplanets. Building a large sample of exoplanets allowed astronomers to reach some understandings about the exoplanet population, and also pose questions that leads them deeper into that population and its characteristics.

In a recent Hot Take segment, the China Global Television Network recently released an interesting video detailing China's future plans for space. Titled "Earth 2.0? China's plan to find new Earth," the video actually details four missions that the China National Space Agency (CNSA) has planned as part of the country's 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-2030). These missions cover a broad range of next-generation science objectives that space agencies worldwide want to achieve in the coming decades.