Space News & Blog Articles

Space-based solar power has been gaining more and more traction recently. The recent success of Caltech’s Space Solar Power Project, which demonstrated the feasibility of transmitting power from space to the ground, has been matched by a number of pilot projects throughout the world, all of which are hoping to tap into some of the almost unlimited and constant solar energy that is accessible up in geostationary orbit (GEO). But, according to a new paper from a group of Italian and German researchers, there are plenty of constraints on getting that power down here to Earth - and most of them are more logistical than technical.

What can cryovolcanism on Pluto teach scientists about the dwarf planet’s current geological activity? This is what a recent study published in *The Planetary Science Journal* hopes to address as a team of researchers investigated potential cryovolcanic sites within specific regions on Pluto. This study has the potential to help scientists better understand the current geological activity, including how it can be active while orbiting so far from the Sun.

On the surface of Mars, there are numerous features that tell of a past age when the planet was warmer and wetter, with rivers, lakes, and even an ocean that covered much of its northern hemisphere. These include river channels, delta fans, sedimentary deposits, and low-lying regions rich in clay minerals. The discovery and study of these features over the past fifty years have raised some pressing questions for scientists. These include the question of how much water once flowed on Mars and what led to the gradual transition that left the planet a frigid, desiccated world, where the only water on the surface comes in the form of ice and permafrost.

At the dawn of time, so the theory goes, the cosmos underwent a flash of rapid expansion. Almost instantly the visible Universe grew from a volume smaller than a proton to a spherical region nearly two meters across. It's a moment known as early cosmic inflation. Although Inflation solves several cosmic problems, such as the homogeneity of the Universe and the ratio of hydrogen to helium we observe, we haven't been able to prove it. But we might be able to prove it by looking for a particular type of gravitational wave.

The ice giants remain some of the most interesting places to explore in the solar system. Uranus in particular has drawn a lot of interest lately, especially after the 2022 Decadal Survey from the National Academies named it as the highest priority destination. But as of now, we still don’t have a fully fleshed out and planned mission ready to go for the multiple launch windows in the 2030s. That might actually be an advantage, though, as a new system coming online might change the overall mission design fundamentally. Starship recently continued its recent string of successful tests, and a new paper presented at the IEEE Aerospace Conference by researchers at MIT looked at how this new, much more capable launch system, could impact the development of the Uranus Orbiter and Probe (UOP) that the Decadal Survey suggested.

Is anybody out there? Probably. Most stars have planets; we've discovered more than 6,000 exoplanets thus far, and the most basic statistics point toward the existence of countless potentially habitable worlds in the Universe. But when we have looked for any scrap of evidence for alien civilizations, we have found nothing so far. The question is why?

*Swarm Sees Key Changes in the Southern Atlantic Anomaly and more. *

When the Apollo astronauts explored the Moon from 1969 to 1972, they left behind several science experiments designed to measure the Moon's magnetic field, seismic activity, and environment. Each mission also returned with samples of rock and soil (regolith), the analysis of which revealed a wealth of information about the Moon's composition. For instance, the rocks showed that the Earth and Moon had similar structures and compositions, leading to the widely accepted theory that the Moon formed 4.5 billion years ago when a Mars-sized object (Theia) impacted primordial Earth (known as the Giant Impact Hypothesis).

In 2008, NASA's Phoenix Lander generated headlines when its thruster exposed subsurface water ice under its landing spot. It then used its robotic arm to dig beneath the surface, where it exposed more ice. Orbiters like Mars Express and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter added additional evidence for subsurface ice with radar and imaging. Now, scientists think that the planet may hold vast amounts of water ice under its surface, enough to potentially cover the entire surface of Mars with 1.5 meters of liquid water.

When the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) began operations, one of its earliest surveys was of galaxies that existed during the very early Universe. In December 2022, these observations revealed multiple objects that appeared as "Little Red Dots" (LRDs), fueling speculation as to what they might be. While the current consensus is that these objects are compact, early galaxies, there is still debate over their composition and what makes them so red. On the one hand, there is the "stellar-only" hypothesis, which states that LRDs are red because they are packed with stars and dust.

Use cases for smart materials in space exploration keep cropping up everywhere. They are used in everything from antenna deployments on satellites to rover deformation and reformation. One of the latest ideas is to use them to transform the solar sails that could primarily be used as a propulsion system for a mission into a heat shield when that mission reaches its final destination. A new paper from Joseph Ivarson and Davide Guzzetti, both of Auburn’s Department of Aerospace Engineering, and published in Acta Astronautica, describes how the idea might work and lists some potential applications exploring various parts of the solar system.

Between 4.1 and 3 billion years ago, Mars was volcanically active. Massive eruptions existed across the planet's surface, throwing material and gases high into the thin Martian atmosphere. A new study uses climate modelling to explore whether these events could have transported water ice to unexpected regions of the red planet. The team, led by Saira Hamid from Arizona State University simulated the ancient volcanic eruptions to see what happened to water vapour during each event. The results from their study were quite surprising.

Most white dwarf binaries, where two stellar remnants orbit each other, have spent millions of years cooling down to surface temperatures around 4,000 degrees Kelvin. These ancient objects sit quietly in space, slowly radiating away their residual heat. But astronomers have discovered a peculiar class of these binary systems that seems to defy all expectations. These white dwarfs orbit each other faster than once per hour, and instead of being cool and compact, they're far hotter than expected, reaching surface temperatures between 10,000 and 30,000 degrees Kelvin, and twice the size theory predicts they should be.

The corona of the Sun is an extraordinary place, with temperatures exceeding one million degrees Celsius, far hotter than the Sun's visible surface below. During solar flares, violent releases of magnetic energy, plasma can cool dramatically and condense into dense blobs that plummet back toward the Sun's photosphere, its visible surface. These falling streams of cooler material create the phenomenon of coronal rain. However, existing solar models couldn't explain the speed at which this cooling happens.

Black holes are the remains of dead supermassive stars. When a star reaches the end of its life, one of two things will happen, either the thermonuclear pressure from fusion will cause the star’s outer layers to expand or gravity wins and the star collapses. In this latter case, what gets left behind is often a black hole, an object whose conditions are so extreme that even light cannot escape.

Impulse Space, the California-based venture founded by veteran SpaceX engineer Tom Mueller, today unveiled its proposed architecture for delivering medium-sized payloads to the moon by as early as 2028.

It is an established scientific fact that most galaxies in the Universe have a supermassive black hole (SMBH) at their center, leading to what is known as an Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN). Also known as "quasars," AGNs are notable for how they emit so much light and radiation that they temporarily outshine all of the stars in their disk. In 2019, scientists with the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration produced the very first image of an SMBH, which resides at the center of the M87 galaxy. However, about a century before this historic accomplishment was made, an astronomer detected a powerful jet coming from the center of this very same galaxy.

Mars is not the most hostile place in our Solar System to life but isn’t somewhere to put on your holiday itinerary just yet. Any organism attempting to survive there would face meteorite impacts, extreme temperature changes, ionising radiation cutting through the thin atmosphere, and highly oxidising salts in the Martian soil that destabilise the molecular bonds holding proteins and cells together. It's a combination of factors that, when taken together would seem insurmountable for most terrestrial life to get a foothold.

Modularity is taking off in more ways than one in space exploration. The design of the upcoming “Lunar Gateway” space station is supposed to be modular, with different modules being supplied by different organizations. In an effort to extend that thinking down to rovers on the ground, a new paper from researchers at Germany’s space agency (DLR), developed an architecture where a single, modular rover could be responsible for both exploration and carrying payloads around the Moon or Mars.

A new study finds possible references to two classic supernovae in ancient texts.

An interstellar comet is as its name suggests, a comet that originated outside our Solar System and travels through interstellar space before entering our neighbourhood. Unlike comets that orbit the Sun and formed within our Solar System, these rare visitors come from other star systems, traveling for millions or even billions of years across interstellar space. When they pass through our Solar System, their trajectories are hyperbolic rather than elliptical, meaning they're just passing through rather than remaining bound by the Sun's gravity. The most famous example is 2I/Borisov, discovered in 2019, which became the first confirmed interstellar comet observed.