Space News & Blog Articles

By its very nature, spaceflight is very challenging and very wasteful. As Tsiolkovsky's famous Rocket Equation establishes, propellant accounts for the majority of a rocket's mass, which is burned off during launch. The process also introduces large amounts of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, water vapor, and black carbon, as well as ozone-depleting chemicals, into the upper atmosphere. On top of that, the disposal process for satellites once they are no longer operational (deorbiting and burning up in the atmosphere) is also wasteful, with no materials retrieved or reused.

Intermediate mass black holes (IMBH), if they exist, have between about 100 and 1000 solar masses, placing them in between stellar black holes and supermassive black holes. But while there's plenty of evidence for both stellar mass black holes and supermassive black holes, the evidence for IMBHs isn't as convincing. There are many candidates, but there's no wide agreement on any of them. Yet our theories of black holes show there should be something in between stellar black holes and supermassive black holes, and IMBHs could be the missing link.

Removing, or “scrubbing”, carbon dioxide from the air of confined spaces is a critical component of any life support system on a spacecraft or submarine. However, modern day ones are energy intensive, requiring temperatures of up to 200℃ to operate. So a research lab led by Dr. Hui He at Guangxi University in China has developed what they call “micro/nano reconfigurable robots” (MNRM) to scrub CO2 from the air much more efficiently. Their work is described in a new paper in Nano-Micro Letters.

The center of the Milky Way is an extreme environment dominated by the supermassive black hole (SMBH) Sagittarius A star (Sgr A-star). Sgr A-star has about 4 million solar masses, and its powerful gravity and radiation defines the region. Its gravity accelerates the orbits of stars and gas clouds in its vicinity. Radiation from the SMBH's accretion processes, from the stellar winds coming from colliding stars, from abundant supernovae explosions, and from superheated gas falling toward the black hole, saturates the region.

(This is Part 1 of a series on primordial black holes!)

The "ice giants" of the Solar System - Uranus and Neptune - remain the least explored of any planets orbiting our Sun. Thanks to the sheer distance between them and Earth, the first probe to ever study them was the Voyager 2 probe, which remains the only mission ever to conduct a flyby. What this probe revealed led to numerous mysteries about both worlds, their systems of moons, and other characteristics. For instance, when Voyager flew past Uranus, it recorded a very strong electron belt of a much higher energy level than expected.

On November 27th, Russia's Baikonur Cosmodrome experienced a severe accident that has suspended Russia's ability to launch payloads and crews to space. Shortly after the Soyuz-MS28 mission launched at 09:27:57 UTC (4:27:57 a.m. EST; 1:27:57 a.m. PST) from Site 31/6 at the launch center, drone footage showed that the 8U216 mobile maintenance cabin was lying upside down in the flame trench. Fortunately, the launch was successful and the crew it carried - cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikayev, and NASA astronaut Christopher Williams - arrived safely at the International Space Station (ISS) a few hours later.

What is “gum”? Most people have probably never considered this question, and might answer something like a chewy material you can put in your mouth. But, to a scientist they might answer something like “nitrogen-rich polymeric sheets”, because precisely defining the chemistry of a material is important to them. Or at least, that’s what they called a type of organic material found in the sample collected of the asteroid Bennu by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. But more informally, scientists have taken to calling it “space gum”, and the process it formed under is making some of them question current models of asteroid formation.

As the Age of Exoplanet Discovery progresses, the search for planets around other stars is becoming more refined. NASA's Kepler and TESS missions were about bulk discovery of exoplanets. Building a large sample of exoplanets allowed astronomers to reach some understandings about the exoplanet population, and also pose questions that leads them deeper into that population and its characteristics.

In a recent Hot Take segment, the China Global Television Network recently released an interesting video detailing China's future plans for space. Titled "Earth 2.0? China's plan to find new Earth," the video actually details four missions that the China National Space Agency (CNSA) has planned as part of the country's 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-2030). These missions cover a broad range of next-generation science objectives that space agencies worldwide want to achieve in the coming decades.

The May 2024 Gannon Solar Storm had a massive impact of the Earth’s space weather environment.

What are other solar system's like? How is our similar to others, and how is it different? In this age of exoplanet discovery, we've found more than 6,000 confirmed exoplanets, and while some of the planets in our system are similar to exoplanets, the exoplanet population contains planet types that aren't reflected in our system.

It’s been over two years since the samples from Bennu gathered by OSIRIS-REx were returned to Earth. But there’s still plenty of novel science coming out of that 121.6 g of material. Three new papers were released recently that describe different aspects of that sample. One in particular, from Yoshihiro Furukawa of Tohoku University in Japan and their co-authors, has already attracted plenty of attention, including from US Senator (and former astronaut) Mark Kelly. It shows that all of the building blocks for early life were available on the asteroid - raising the chances that planets throughout the galaxy could be seeded with the abiotic precursors for life.

What can mapped drainage systems on Mars teach scientists about the Red Planet’s watery past? This is what a recent study published in the *Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences* hopes to address as a team of scientists from the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) conducted a first-time mapping study involving Martian river basins. This study has the potential to not only gain insight into ancient Mars and how much water existed there long ago but also develop new methods for mapping ancient river basins on Mars and potentially other worlds.

Your sunscreen sits in the bathroom cabinet, slowly changing. The mayonnaise in your fridge gradually separates. That prescription cream loses effectiveness over time. All these materials share something fundamental, they're soft matter, substances like gels, foams, and colloids whose internal structure reorganises slowly and mysteriously over months or years.

On a summer day in 709 BCE, scribes at the Lu Duchy Court in ancient China looked up to witness something extraordinary. The Sun vanished completely from the sky, and in its place hung a ghostly halo. They recorded the event carefully, noting that during totality the eclipsed Sun appeared "completely yellow above and below." Nearly three millennia later, that ancient observation has helped modern scientists measure how fast Earth was spinning and understand what our Sun was doing at a time when Homer was composing poetry.

Plate tectonics is a fundamental aspect of Earth's geological activity and history. In addition to constantly rearranging the placement of continents, they also play a major role in maintaining the conditions that ensure Earth's continued habitability. However, Earth is the only terrestrial (rocky) planet in the Solar System with active plate tectonics. While this is understandable for Mercury and Mars, which are single-plate planets that are largely geologically inactive, due to rapid cooling in their interiors billions of years ago. But Venus, Earth's "Sister Planet," has remained something of a mystery.

Stars form in massive clouds of gas called molecular clouds. As they form, they accrete gas from these clouds, and as the stars rotate, gas and dust accumulates in a rotating disk around the star called a protoplanetary disk. As the name makes clear, this is where planets form by accreting material from the disk.

In the fields of science and science communication, there are few things more controversial than claims regarding the discovery of extraterrestrial life. This includes claims ranging from the discovery of the most basic lifeforms (lichens, single-celled organisms, etc.) to evidence of advanced civilizations. Such claims are incredibly common, thanks to the sensationalism surrounding the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) and the search for life beyond Earth (astrobiology). Even when scientists have avoided issuing declarative judgments, it is very easy for statements to be twisted and misrepresented.

Searching for technosignatures - signs of technology on a planet that we can see from afr - remains a difficult task. There are so many different factors to consider, and we only have the technological capabilities to detect a relatively small collection of them. A new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv but also accepted for publication into The Astrophysical Journal Letters, from Jacob Haqq-Misra of the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science and his co-authors explores some of those capabilities by using a framework they developed known as Project Janus that estimates what technology will look like on Earth 1,000 years from now in the hopes that we can test whether or not we can detect it on another planet.

What can an exoplanet leaking helium teach astronomers about the formation and evolution of exoplanet atmospheres? This is what a recent study published in *Nature Astronomy* hopes to address as an international team of scientists investigated atmospheric escape on a puffy exoplanet. This study has the potential to help scientists better understand the formation and evolution of gas giant planets, specifically with many gas giant planets observed orbiting extremely close to their stars.