Space News & Blog Articles

NASA and the China National Space Agency (CNSA) plan to send astronauts to Mars as early as the next decade. Naturally, this ambitious goal requires a great deal of planning, research, and the anticipation and preparation for all potential challenges in advance. Among them, astronaut health and safety are paramount. In addition to the hazards associated with the long transit times - radiation and the effects of long periods in microgravity - there's the issue of Mars itself. Aside from exposure to elevated radiation levels, Martian gravity is about 38% of Earth's.

You just established a settlement on an Earth-like planetary body far from our solar system. You did your evening chores after eating dinner, and you want to go out for the evening view, which consists of two setting stars, reminiscent of the infamous scene in Star Wars. However, there’s one major difference: a large planetary body is in the sky. As you were aware before arriving, you’re on an exomoon orbiting a Saturn-sized exoplanet, both of which orbits two stars.

Binary stars are known to transfer mass to one another. In extreme cases, mass transfer can even cause a supernova explosion. That happens when a white dwarf draws matter from a companion.

There are some strange types of exoplanets out there with no counterparts in our Solar System. One of those types is super-puff planets. These oddballs have radii larger than Neptune, but only have a few Earth masses. This means they have large volumes and low density. How this peculiar type of exoplanet forms is unclear, and current models of gas giant formation can't account for them.

Space weather is a fascinating subject, but one we still have a lot to learn about. One of the main components of it is the active regions (ARs) of the Sun. These huge concentrations of magnetic fields show up throughout the Sun’s photosphere and are the primary source of solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs). They can be simple pairings of magnetic flux or huge, magnetically complex tangles that spend weeks creating massive solar storms before dissipating. But tracking the longest lived of these ARs has been a headache for solar physicists, and a recent paper by Emily Mason and Kara Kniezewski, published in The Astrophysical Journal, both dives into this tracking problem and uncovers some interesting features of the Sun’s most persistent ARs.

Most objects that astronomers and astrophysicists study have existed for billions of years. Things like supermassive black holes, the Milky Way galaxy, even the Sun and the Earth predate humanity by billions of years.

In a recent statement, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney announced that the federal government is investing $200 million towards Canada's first launch pad in Nova Scotia. The site is owned by Maritime Launch Services, a Canadian commercial space company founded in 2016 and headquartered in Halifax, Nova Scotia. This investment reflects the federal government's recently released Defense Industrial Strategy, issued by the Defense Industrial Agency (DIA). This document establishes aerospace and aerospace platforms as one of Canada's "key sovereign capabilities."

Some observations are the result of years of meticulous planning and cooperation between astronomers, different telescopes and observatories, and even different governments. Others are more serendipitous, and are little more than happy accidents. That's the case with the Hubble's recent observation of Comet C/2025 K1 (ATLAS) as it fragmented.

In 1959, the Luna 2 probe from the Soviet Union became the very first human-made object to reach our closest celestial neighbor. In the decades since, we have been leaving footprints - both literally and figuratively - all over the Moon. Today, there are over 100 metric tons of human-made material resting on the Moon’s surface - everything from advanced cameras and sensors to literal human waste. But that’s nothing compared to what’s to come. NASA predicts the next decade will see over 100 new lunar missions, equaling or exceeding all the missions previously flown. Which brings up a pressing question about all the stuff that’s already there - how do we protect that history? A new paper by Teasel Muir-Harmony, the Curator of the Space History Department of the Smithsonian and Todd Mosher, a Scholar in Residence at University of Colorado, Boulder, reports on a Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Summit on Outer Space Heritage that dives into the legal, scientific, and engineering hurdles of preserving these historic sites.

A recent study links ground and space-based observations to track structures moving through the solar corona.

The European Space Agency’s (ESA’s) Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) probe is on its (very long) way to Jupiter, and will finally arrive at the King of Planets in 2031. Its primary mission is to focus on the “big three” icy moons - Ganymede, Europa, and Callisto. But while JUICE is busy mapping Ganymede’s magnetic field, it will also be keeping a sharp eye on the other 94 moons in the Jupiter system. A recent paper published in Space Science Reviews by Tilmann Denk of DLR, Germany’s space research association, and his co-authors showcases just how much “bonus science” JUICE is expected to squeeze out of these other targets.

A strange lack of stellar orbits around the core of the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) mystified astronomers for decades. Not only that, but the SMC has a strange, irregular shape, and sports a tidal. Now, a team of observers led by graduate student Himansch Rathore at the University of Arizona, has tracked down the reason why the stars don't orbit. It's because the SMC crashed directly through its neighbor, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), in the distant past. That huge collision disrupted stellar motions and sent them on wildly different trajectories. It also disturbed the clouds of gas within the SMC and created a tail of gas stretching out across space.

Earth was once a magma ocean world, just as all rocky worlds were early in their development, according to theory. As the very young Earth cooled, only the outer core remained molten, wrapped around a solid inner core and covered by the solid mantle and crust. This arrangement, along with coriolis forces, is what sustains our protective magnetosphere.

NASA’s Star-Planet Activity Research CubeSat (SPARCS) is a small space telescope that launched to space on January 11th, 2026. Created by NASA and researchers from the School of Earth and Space Exploration (SESE) at the University of Arizona, the mission is tasked with monitoring the flares and sunspot activity of low-mass stars (M-type red dwarfs and K-type orange dwarfs). The telescope is equipped with far- and near-ultraviolet instruments to assess the habitability of the space environment around planets orbiting these stars.

Conventional SETI (Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence) strategies have long been built on the idea that intelligent extraterrestrials (ETI) would aim to communicate with other intelligent civilizations along a very narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum, preferably in the radio spectrum.

The Large Hadron Collider’s subatomic discoveries didn’t stop with the Higgs boson: This week, scientists at Europe’s CERN research center announced that the collider’s LHCb experiment has detected a doubly charmed particle that’s like a proton, but four times as weighty.

This is Part 4 of a series on topological defects. Read Parts 1, 2, and 3.

Oxygen has been the most important gas in our search for life among the cosmos thus far. On Earth, we have it in abundance because it is produced by biological synthesis. But that might not be the case on other planets, so even if we do find a very clear high oxygen signal in the atmosphere of an exoplanet, it might not be a clear indication that life exists there. A new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv, from Margaret Turcotte Seavey and a team of researchers from institutions like the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and Johns Hopkins University, adds some additional context to what else might be going on in those atmospheres. In particular, they note that if there’s even a little bit of water vapor, it can make a big difference in whether a lifeless rock looks like a living, thriving world.

Greek mythology has given a name to a great many objects in our solar system. But perhaps one of the least well understood are the Trojans, named after the people of Troy featured in The Iliad. When astronomers refer to them, they are normally talking about a group of over 10,000 confirmed asteroids orbiting at the Lagrange points both in front of and behind Jupiter on its orbit around the Sun. But, more generally, astronomers can now use the term to refer to any co-orbital setup - indeed almost every planet in our solar system has Trojans, though not as many as Jupiter. Which also leads to the belief that “exotrojans” must exist around other stars. Despite our best efforts with initiatives like the TROY project, so far we have yet to find one. But a new paper published in The Astrophysical Journal by Jackson Taylor of West Virginia University and an abundance of co-authors took the hunt to one of the most extreme environments in the universe: pulsar binary systems.

The International Space Station (ISS), which has been continuously occupied for 26 years, is approaching retirement. By 2030, all participating space agencies will bring their astronauts home for the last time, and the station will be maneuvered so it burns up in Earth's atmosphere. The legacy of this station is unmatched, and its successors (of which several are planned) will have extremely big shoes to fill. Nevertheless, there's no shortage of space programs and commercial interests looking to place new space stations in orbit.

The Milky Way could host billions of free-floating planets (FFP) according to some research estimates. Also called rogue planets, these worlds drift through interstellar space on their own trajectories, unbound to any star. Many of these worlds form around stars like other planets do, and so it's reasonable to think that they also have moons.