Space News & Blog Articles

If humans are ever going to live and work in space, it is paramount that we can meet our basic needs far from home. This includes food and water, but the most vital element is a steady supply of clean air to breathe. This is especially important for long-duration missions to the Moon, Mars, and other deep space destinations. For any astronauts or inhabitants this far from Earth, opportunities for resupply missions are few and far between. To this end, NASA and other space agencies are looking to In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) as the solution.

The Solar System's icy moons are a focal point in our search for habitability and life. Among them are Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto, all Galilean moons of Jupiter. Their environmental conditions play a big role in potential habitability, but so does chemistry. Without the right molecular building blocks, life can't get started.

No two snowflakes are the same, and neither are nebulae. The NASA/ESA/CSA JWST showed how undeniable that statement is when it imaged PMR 1, also known as the Exposed Cranium Nebula (ECN). The glowing cloud of gas and dust bears an eerie resemblance to a cosmic x-ray of a human skull, complete with a double-hemisphere arrangement of grey matter.

Don’t miss the only total lunar eclipse of 2026, this coming Tuesday.

When the venerable Hubble Space Telescope made its Deep Fields studies of the early Universe, it discovered something that would puzzle astronomers to this day. When the Universe was just a few billion years old, it was already populated by several large galaxies. This mystery only deepened with the deployment of the James Webb Space Telescope, which observed an abundance of bright galaxies that existed even sooner. For astronomers, this begged the question of how such massive and evolved galaxies could exist shortly after the Big Bang.

The *New Horizons* mission made history on Jan. 1st, 2019, when it became the first spacecraft to conduct a close flyby with Arrokoth, a Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) beyond the orbit of Pluto. The images it captured of this object, revealing a snowman-shaped profile, surprised and perplexed astronomers. Since then, astronomers have debated how such objects could form in the outer reaches of the Solar System. And now, researchers at Michigan State University (MSU) believe they have found the answer, and it's really quite simple: gravitational collapse.

In this age of Mars rovers, questions about the planet's ancient past have shifted. A growing body of evidence supports the idea that Mars was once warm and wet. Now researchers are focused on the timeline of the red planet's watery past. Research efforts all come down to the ultimate question regarding the planet: Did it ever host life?

Thinking about food systems in deep space likely brings to mind something like the Martian where an astronaut is scratching barely enough food to survive out of potatoes grown in Martian regolith. Or perhaps a fancy hydroponic system on an interplanetary transport ship, with artificial lighting and all the associated technological wizardry. But a new paper published in Acta Astronautica by Tor Blomqvist and Ralph Fritsche points out that growing food is only one small part of the whole cycle of providing sustenance for astronauts in space. To really get a sense of how difficult it will be, we have to look at the whole picture.

March is the time to catch the encore performance for comet E1 Wierzchos crossing the evening sky.

Searching for past or present life on Mars is the sole driving force behind every mission we send to the Red Planet, from orbiters to landers to rovers. However, there remains a concern in the scientific community of Earth-based microbes hitching a ride on Mars-bound spacecraft, also called forward contamination. The concern is potentially mistaking Earth microbes for Mars life or Earth microbes potentially influence samples of Mars life we might find. While NASA is dedicated to mitigating it as much as possible, could new methods help determine how long Earth-based microbes could survive on Mars, this alleviating concerns for forward contamination?

The Sun regularly emits streams of charged particles (solar wind) from its upper atmosphere (the corona), which flow throughout the Solar System that interacts with Earth's magnetic field. This is what powers the beautiful aurorae visible in the Northern and Southern hemispheres (Aurora Borealis and Australis. It can also play havoc with modern technological systems, including telecommunications, GPS navigation, and electrical power grids. Since 2015, NASA's Magnetosphere Multiscale (MMS) mission has been collecting data on Earth's magnetosphere.

Young stars are known for their powerful radiation and strong winds. They can shape their gaseous surroundings, both promoting and inhibiting other stars from forming, depending on the circumstances. Their strong winds also have another effect: the stars inflate gaseous bubbles around themselves.

Supernovae explosions are hard to miss. When they explode, they can outshine all of the stars in their host galaxies for months. But understanding the physics behind these powerful phenomena requires studying their progenitors before they explode.

Asteroid mining companies are finally getting off the ground, and that is raising some concerns about the impact those activities will have on the space environment. A new paper published in Acta Astronautica from Anna Marie Brenna of the University of Waikato in New Zealand discusses a framework that she thinks might work to solve the legal challenges facing those who want to protect the space environment and those who want to exploit it.

If you’ve been following exoplanet research over the last couple of years, you’ve definitely heard of K2-18b. Located 124 light years away in the constellation Leo, it’s attracted a lot of attention as it sits squarely in its red dwarf host star’s habitable zone, and measurements of the James Webb Space Telescope show its atmosphere is rich in carbon dioxide and methane. It’s one of the prime candidates for a “Hycean” world - one where a thick hydrogen-rich atmosphere covers a global liquid water ocean. It is such an intriguing target for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) researchers that they turned two of the most powerful radio telescopes in the world to watch K2-18b’s system. A recent paper, available in pre-print on arXiv, shows that there is likely no artificial narrow-band radio signals that are equivalent to our technology level coming from the planet, despite millions of potential hits.

There have been plenty of attempts to resolve the “Hubble Tension” in cosmology. This feature describes how one of the most important variables in cosmology, the expansion of the universe, takes on different values depending on how you measure it. A new NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Phase I report on the Cosmic Positioning System (CPS) details another potential solution to it - this one involving a network of five far-flung satellites spread throughout the solar system.

Our solar system is home to a wide diversity of planetary bodies, boasting eight planets, five officially recognized dwarf planets, and almost 1,000 confirmed moons. The eight planets consist of the four rocky (terrestrial) planets of the inner solar system and the four gas giant planets of the outer solar system. The largest planet in our solar system is Jupiter, measuring a radius and mass of 11 and 318 times of Earth, respectively. However, the discovery of exoplanets quickly altered our understanding of planetary sizes, as several have been discovered to have masses and radii several times that of Jupiter. So, how big can planet get, and are there limits to their sizes?

In the coming weeks or months, the Artemis II rocket will make its launch window and take off from Launch Pad 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The mission will then carry Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, Mission Specialist Christina Koch, and Canadian Mission Specialist Jeremy Hansen on a ten-day trip around the Moon. The flight will not only validate the Space Launch System (SLS) and Orion spacecraft for crewed missions. It will also raise the curtain on humanity's long-awaited return to the Moon; this time, with the intention of staying.

When stars like our Sun reach the end of their main sequence, they enter their Red Giant Branch phase and expand to become several times their original size. During this time, the star will undergo chemical changes in its interior, altering the composition of its surface layer. For decades, researchers have wondered how the changing chemical composition in the interior drives changes in the upper layers. Central to this question is the stable layer that connects the core to the outer layer and serves as a barrier between the two.

Space science is interesting in its diversity. At times, it's an extremely complex, expensive and time-consuming effort to gather data. Look how challenging it was for Curiosity and Perseverance to reach the surface of Mars safely. Look at the JWST's long journey from clean room to Sun-Earth L2, and its eventual science results.

Searching for life beyond Earth has rapidly advanced in recent years. However, directly imaging an exoplanet and all their incredible features remain elusive given the literal astronomical distances from Earth. Therefore, astronomers have settled by exploring exoplanet atmospheres for signatures of life, also called biosignatures. This is currently conducted by analyzing the starlight that passes through an exoplanet’s atmosphere, known as spectroscopy, as it passes in front of its star, also called a transit. But improvements continue to be made to better explore exoplanet atmospheres, specifically cleaning up messy data.