Space News & Blog Articles

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.

Imagine a star that’s been shining steadily for decades, and then suddenly it dims to just 3% of its normal brightness. Not for a few days or weeks, but for more than nine months. That’s exactly what happened to ASASSN-24fw, a star sitting 3,200 light years away in the constellation Monoceros.

When you look at a volcano, you’re seeing the tip of a vastly more complicated system. The mountain itself is just the exit point for processes that have been happening deep underground, perhaps for millions of years. Magma doesn’t simply appear at the surface ready to erupt it rises, stalls, cools, changes, and evolves in underground chambers before finally breaking through.

Scientists have been making some incredible discoveries in space that are shedding new light on the origins of life. In addition to finding amino acids in asteroids, scientists have also found fatty acids found on Mars, sulfur-bearing molecules in interstellar space, and that peptides form spontaneously in space. Most recently, research based on data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has found an abundance of small organic molecules in a nearby galaxy.

China has achieved several impressive milestones in its space program in recent years. As part of their plan to build an outpost on the Moon that will compete with NASA's Artemis Program - the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) - they are busy developing a super-heavy launch system and a crew-capable spacecraft that will take taikonauts to the Moon by the end of the decade. That is the plan, at any rate, and recent tests indicate that they are on track to achieve that goal. On Wednesday, Feb. 11th, the China Manned Spaceflight Agency (CMSA) completed a major test of its Long March-10 rocket and the Mengzhou spacecraft.

Ten years ago, humanity detected its first gravitational wave. On 14 January 2025, we detected the clearest one yet and it’s teaching us new things about the fundamental laws governing our universe.

The universe was supposed to take its time building the largest structures in existence. Galaxy clusters, containing hundreds or thousands of individual galaxies bound together by gravity and immersed in enormous pools of superheated gas, should require billions of years to assemble. Standard models predict these monsters couldn’t possibly form in the universe’s early childhood.

Cosmic rays, or astroparticles, are a means through which astronomers can explore the Universe. These charged particles, which are mostly protons and the nuclei of atoms stripped of their electrons, travel through space at close to the speed of light. By tracing them back to their sources, scientists can learn more about the forces that have shaped the Solar System and the Milky Way galaxy at large. When cosmic rays reach Earth, most are deflected by Earth's magnetosphere, but some manage to penetrate our atmosphere and reach the surface.

The universe is a big place, and tracking down some of the more interesting parts of it is tricky. Some of the most interesting parts of it, at least from a physics perspective, are merging black holes, so scientists spend a lot of time trying to track those down. One of the most recent attempts to do so was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters by the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) collaboration. While they didn’t find any clear-cut evidence of continuous gravitational waves from merging black hole systems, they did manage to point out plenty of false alarms, and even disprove some myths about ones we thought actually existed.