Space News & Blog Articles

Our solar system hosts almost 900 known moons, with more than 400 orbiting the eight planets while the remaining orbit dwarf planets, asteroids, and Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs). Of these, only a handful are targets for astrobiology and could potentially support life as we know it, including Jupiter’s moons Europa and Ganymede, and Saturn’s moon Titan and Enceladus. While these moons orbit two of the largest planets in our solar system, what about moons orbiting giant exoplanets, also called exomoons? But, to find life on exomoons, scientists need to find exomoons to begin with.

If humans ever want to work and live in space, whether in habitats on the Moon or Mars or in stations far from Earth, a reliable source of clean drinking water is essential. This presents many challenges in space, where resources are limited, and resupply missions are costly, time-consuming, or both. For starters, humans cannot survive for more than three days without water. Water is also essential for oxygen generation, irrigating edible plants, and hygiene. Meeting these requirements requires a closed-loop system that can provide clean water for months to years without replenishment.

More and more papers are coming out about the upcoming Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO). As the telescope moves from theory to practice (and physical manifestation), various working groups are discovering, defining, and designing their way to the world’s next major exoplanet observatory. A new paper from researchers at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center adds another layer of analysis - we even just reported on its immediate predecessor two weeks ago. In this one, the researchers compared the ability of the telescope to distinguish between carbon dioxide and methane/water, to come up with a specific wavelength the engineers should design for.

NASA and JPL are working hard to develop more autonomy for their Mars rovers. Both of their current rovers on Mars—MSL Curiosity and Perseverance—are partly autonomous, with Perseverance being a little more advanced. In fact, developing more autonomous navigation was an explicit part of Perseverance's mission.

Theory shows that stars can collapse directly into black holes without first exploding as supernovae. In fact, this should be a relatively common occurrence. But despite that, astronomers have found scant observational evidence to support it.

Nearly two years after Boeing’s botched Starliner mission to the International Space Station, NASA put the mishap in the same category as the Challenger and Columbia space shuttle disasters — and said the spacecraft wouldn’t carry another crew until dozens of corrective actions are taken.

The odds of finding any sort of smoking gun for non-baryonic (or exotic) dark matter --- the missing matter of the universe hypothesized to be made up of exotic elementary particles such as WIMPS (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles), seems to get longer with each passing year.

How do galaxies evolve? When did they start forming? Those are questions astronomers and cosmologists are working to answer. The standard evolutionary path includes early bright star-forming activity, a middle age, and then a quiescent old age where they stop making stars. That changes if the galaxy happens to collide with another one, because that spurs new bouts of starbirth. It's been this way since stars and galaxies first began forming, hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang.

Everybody knows that galaxies are large structures made of stars. That's a simple definition, and ignores the fact that galaxies also contain gas, dust, planets, moons, comets, asteroids, etc., and of course, dark matter. But one type of galaxy is mostly made of dark matter, and they're difficult to detect.

The early Universe was a busy place. As the infant cosmos exanded, that epoch saw the massive first stars forming, along with protogalaxies. It turns out those extremely massive early stars were stirring up chemical changes in the first globular clusters, as well. Not only that, many of those monster stars ultimately collapsed as black holes.

Astronomers working with JWST have found a jellyfish galaxy only about 5 billion years after the Big Bang. Jellyfish galaxies are so named because they trail streams of gas that look like jellyfish tentacles. They're created when a galaxy moves rapidly through a cluster, and the intracluster medium (ICM) strips gas from them, stretching it into long streams.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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?