Space News & Blog Articles

Lunar dust remains one of the biggest challenges for a long-term human presence on the Moon. Its jagged, clingy nature makes it naturally stick to everything from solar panels to the inside of human lungs. And while we have some methods of dealing with it, there is still plenty of experimentation to do here on Earth before we use any such system in the lunar environment. A new paper in Acta Astronautica from Francesco Pacelli and Alvaro Romero-Calvo of Georgia Tech and their co-authors describes two types of flexible Electrodynamic Dust Shields (EDSs) that could one day be used in such an environment.

Just a few hundred light-years from Earth, the famous variable star Mira A is huffing and puffing its outer layers to space. Its most recent mass-loss event ejected more material at higher velocity than in past events. A team of astronomers led by Theo Khouri of Chalmers University in Sweden discovered two large asymmetrical clouds of material expanding away from Mira A.

There’s been plenty in the news about 3I/ATLAS over the course of the past 8 months. Our third confirmed interstellar visitor went behind the Sun during its closest approach, but reemerged in December with plenty of eyes watching it. Papers describing what it looks like following its closest brush with the power of a star in probably billions of years are starting to come out, including a new one available in pre-print on arXiv from Carey Lisse of Johns Hopkins University and his co-authors, which shows how much the comet - and it is definitely a comet - has changed in the matter of only a few months.

Astronomers know that supermassive black holes (SMBH) can inhibit star formation. These behemoths, which seem to be present in the center of large galaxies like ours, inject energy into their surroundings, heating up star-forming gas. Gas needs to be cool to collapse and form stars, so active SMBH put a damper on the process.

When we think of ice on Mars, we typically think of the poles, where we can see it visibly through probes and even ground-based telescopes. But the poles are hard to access, and even more so given the restrictions on exploration there due to potential biological contamination. Scientists have long hoped to find water closer to the equator, making it more accessible to human explorers. There are parts of the mid-latitudes of Mars that appear to be glaciers covered by thick layers of dust and rock. So are these features really holding massive reserves of water close to where humans might first step foot on the Red Planet? They might be, according to a new paper from M.A. de Pablo and their co-authors, recently published in Icarus.

The Milky Way's galactic center should be home to many pulsars, but for some reason, we can't find them. New research identified a candidate pulsar very near the MW's center. If it can be confirmed, it's a chance to test General Relativity.

This past weekend, ground crews at the Kennedy Space Center replaced a filter in the ground support equipment used for propellant loading. This filter was suspected of reducing the flow of liquid hydrogen into the Core Stage during the wet dress rehearsal of the *Artemis II* rocket on Feb. 12th. The test provided the engineers with enough data to prepare for a second wet dress rehearsal, which NASA is targeting for Thursday, Feb. 19th. This test will put the launch team and supporting teams through a full range of operations.

Every planet in the Solar System is mysterious in its own way. How did Venus evolve into such a hellscape? Did Mars ever support life? How did life on Earth get started?

It’s an age-old debate in space circles: Should humanity’s first city on another world be built on the moon, or on Mars?

Results are coming out from the samples returned by China’s Chang’e-6 sample return mission to the far side of the Moon. They offer our first close-up look at the geology and history of the far side, and a recent paper published in Science Advances from researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences has very interesting insights about the impact history of the Moon itself, and even some for the solar system at large.

Using local resources will be key to any mission to either the Moon or Mars - in large part because of how expensive it is to bring those resources up from Earth to our newest outposts. But Mars in particular has one local resource that has long been thought of as a negative - perchlorates. These chemicals, which are toxic to almost all life, make up between 0.5-1% of Martian soil, and have long been thought to be a hindrance rather than a help to our colonization efforts for the new planet. But a new paper from researchers at the Indian Institute of Science and the University of Florida shows that, when making the bricks that will build the outpost, perchlorates actually help.

In 2023, NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission delivered samples of the 4.6-billion-year-old asteroid Bennu to Earth. Upon examining them, scientists discovered that the asteroid - which existed when the Solar System was in the earliest phase of its formation - contained amino acids, the fundamental building blocks of life as we know it. These acids are responsible for the production of proteins and peptides found in DNA. Their retrieval from space confirmed what scientists had theorized decades ago: that the ingredients for life came from space.

Many factors influence a planet's habitability. The more obvious ones include being in a star's habitable zone and having a magnetic shield to protect it from radiation. But other important factors are less obvious.

The Moon paves the way among the planets in the last half of February.

Dark energy is one of those cosmological features that we are still learning about. While we can’t see it directly, we can most famously observe its effects on the universe - primarily how it is causing the expansion of the universe to speed up. But recently, physicists have begun to question even that narrative, pointing to results that show the expansion isn’t happening at the same rate our math would have predicted. In essence, dark energy might be changing over time, and that would have a huge impact on the universe’s expansion and cosmological physics in general. A new paper available in pre-print on arXiv from Dr. Slava Turyshev, who is also famously the most vocal advocate of the Solar Gravitational Lens mission, explores an alternative possibility that our data is actually just messy from inaccuracies in how we measure particular cosmological features - like supernovae.

Nobody expects hydrogen sulphide to smell pleasant. The molecule responsible for the distinctive odour of rotten eggs hardly suggests breakthrough science. Yet its detection in the atmospheres of four distant gas giants has just answered one of planetary science's most fundamental questions: what makes a planet a planet?

The arrival of 3I/ATLAS in our Solar System spawned multiple proposals for a rendezvous mission to study it up close. As the third interstellar object (ISO) ever detected, the wealth of information direct studies could provide would be groundbreaking in many respects. However, the mission architecture for intercepting an interstellar comet poses numerous significant challenges for mission designers and planners. Chief among them is the technological readiness level (TRL) of the proposed propulsion systems, ranging from conventional rockets to directed-energy propulsion (DEP).

At just 500 kilometres across, Saturn's sixth largest moon would fit comfortably inside my home country, the United Kingdom with room to spare. Yet new research reveals this tiny ice world wields electromagnetic influence over distances exceeding half a million kilometres, more than the distance between Earth and the Moon.

Earth's radiation budget, that’s the balance between incoming sunlight and outgoing heat, drives our climate system. Understanding it requires measuring radiation escaping from every corner of our planet, but current satellite observations face a fundamental trade off. Low Earth orbit satellites provide detailed snapshots but miss temporal continuity, whilst geostationary satellites maintain constant watch but can't see the whole globe at once. Time for an unusual solution, enter an unlikely observation platform: the Moon.

The European Space Agency, Arianespace, and ArianeGroup conducted the first launch of the Ariane 6 rocket in July 2024. This three-stage expendable launch system uses a main-stage and upper-stage rocket with strap-on boosters. Designed to succeed the Ariane 5 launch vehicle, this latest member of the rocket family was designed to offer greater versatility and payload capacity than its predecessors. In its original configuration, the Ariane 62, the rocket had two strap-on boosters, giving it a medium payload capacity of 10,350 kg (22,820 lb) to Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and 4,500 kg (9,900 lb) to geostationary orbit (GSO).

Picture this…. you’ve spent five years building an exquisitely sensitive scientific instrument. You’ve tested it, shipped it halfway around the world, reassembled it in Antarctica, and now you’re watching it disappear into the blue sky aboard a giant balloon. For the next three weeks, all you can do is monitor it from the ground and hope everything works.