Space News & Blog Articles

Some parts of the Moon are more interesting than others, especially when searching for future places for humans to land and work. There are also some parts of the Moon that we know less about than others, such as the Irregular Mare Patches (IMPs) that dot the landscape. We know very little about how they were formed, and what that might mean for the history of the Moon itself. A new mission, called the LUnar Geology Orbiter (LUGO), aims to collect more data on the IMPs and search for lava tubes that might serve as future homes to humanity.

Supermassive Black Holes reside at the center of large galaxies, where they dominate their surroundings and sometimes eat stars. When they gobble up a star, they emit a distinctive light flare. This makes it easier for astronomers to pinpoint their location. Astronomers have detected one of these flares offset from a galactic center. Is the black hole shifting its location?

We tend to think of habitability in terms of individual planets and their potential to host life. But barring outliers like rogue planets with internal heating or icy moons with subsurface oceans created by tidal heating, it's exoplanet/star relationships that generate habitability, not individual planets. New research emphasizes that fact.

Most astronomers agree that life is likely common throughout the Universe. While Earth is the only world known to have life, we know that life arose early on our world, and the building blocks of life, including amino acids and sugars, form readily. We also know there are countless worlds in the cosmos that might be home for life. But just because life is likely, that doesn't mean proving it will be easy. Many of the biosignatures we can observe can also have abiotic origins. So how can we be sure? One way is to compare our observations of a habitable world with other worlds in the system.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. That truism, now known as the "Sagan standard" after science communication Carl Sagan, has been around in some form since David Hume first published it in the 1740s. But, with modern-day data collection, sometimes even extraordinary evidence isn't enough - it's how you interpret it. That's the argument behind a new pre-print paper by Luis Welbanks and their colleagues at Arizona State University and various other American institutions. They analyzed the data behind the recent claims of biosignature detection in the atmosphere of K2-18b and found that other non-biological interpretations could also explain the data.

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Could Study Dying Planets

One of the unanswered questions in astronomy is just how supermassive black holes grew so big, so quickly. A team of astronomers have tried to answer this question by searching for actively feeding supermassive black holes (aka quasars) as a way to measure how much material material they are actually accumulating. They studied nebulae near the quasars that light up with the quasar is releasing radiation and found that many of the more distant quasars have only been active for a few hundred thousand years, not long enough to grow to the size we see today.

Over the past decade or so, astronomers have speculated about the characteristics of rogue planets in the Milky Way Galaxy. These "free-floating" worlds don't orbit stars, but instead roam the spaceways. They're hard to spot with current technology, but the upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (Roman) will be a perfect instrument to find them and give insights into the history and features they may have in common with Solar System worlds.

The most massive stars in the Milky Way contain one hundred times more mass than the Sun, even more in some cases. These O-type stars are extremely hot, luminous, and blue, and often die in supernova explosions. Astrophysicists want to know how they get so big, and a simple household chemical might hold the answer.

If astronomy has a Holy Grail, it's another habitable world. To find one, NASA is working with partners to develop the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO). The HWO would be the first telescope built to detect Earth-like planets around Sun-like stars. China is building the Closeby Habitable Exoplanet Survey (CHES), and new research shows that by working together, HWO and CHES would amplify their results.

When ISS astronauts return home, they have a hot ride back to Earth's surface. It's been that way since the beginning of human spaceflight to orbital space and beyond. The incoming vehicle uses friction with Earth's atmosphere to slow down to a safe landing speed. The "hot ride" part comes because that friction builds up high temperatures on the spacecraft's "skin". Without protection, the searing heat of atmospheric re-entry could destroy it. This same heating happens to incoming meteoroids as they whip through Earth's atmosphere.

NASA’s Psyche mission is on its way to explore a metal-rich asteroid in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. All was going well since its launch in October 2023 until nasa announced a decrease in fuel pressure for the propulsion system. It uses a solar electric propulsion system, generating thrust with four electric ion engines that expel xenon ions, giving the spacecraft a gentle nudge in the opposite direction. It has been firing its thrusters continuously since May 2024, but in April 2025, engineers detected the pressure drop. Thankfully they have redundancy built in but are still troubleshooting the issue.

On May 7th, the Japanese space exploration company ispace announced that its HAKUTO-R RESILIENCE lander entered lunar orbit after completing a 9-minute thruster burn. It's now in a stable lunar orbit, and operators will spend the next month testing and preparing for its landing attempt on June 5. This is the company's second attempt at landing on the Moon, after the first attempt crashed in 2023. It's carrying a micro-rover and several science experiments.

The Fermi Paradox presents us with a striking contradiction: despite the high probability of numerous civilizations existing throughout the Universe, we've encountered no evidence or communication from any alien intelligence. A new paper just published calculates that we should have a 99% chance of detecting at least one signal from another civilisation—assuming they survive for several hundred years and could be distributed anywhere across the Milky Way galaxy. This calculation further deepens the mystery of our apparent cosmic solitude.