Space News & Blog Articles

Gravitational wave (GW) observatories have been a great addition to cosmologists’ arsenal in the lack decade. With their first effective detection at the Laser Interferometric Gravitational Observatory completed in 2015, they opened up a whole new world of data collection for scientists. However, so far, they haven’t solved one of the fundamental problems at the heart of their discipline – the “Hubble tension.” Now a new paper discusses the possibility of utilizing a network of new, space-based gravitational wave observatories to get closer than ever to the real value of one of the most important numbers in the Universe.

Edwin Hubble didn’t actually discover “Hubble’s Law,” the equation that contains the constant that bears his name – that work was done earlier and independently by Alexander Friedmann and George Lemaitre. Their work showed that the Universe was expanding and that the rate it was growing seemed determined by the distance between the observer and the galaxy itself. 

Now commonly accepted as the expansion of the Universe, this was a groundbreaking theory in the 1920s when it was initially formulated. However, like many good scientific theories, it can be simplified to a single equation: v = H0D. In this case, v is the speed of separation (the expansion of the Universe), D is the distance to the galaxy being compared, and H0 is known as the “Hubble Constant.”

The Hubble constant has been a source of argument for years, as its value literally will help determine the fate of the Universe. If it’s large, then the Universe will end in heat death, where galaxies are so far apart from one another that they can’t ever possibly interact. Alternatively, if it is small, the Universe could end in a “Big Bounce” where gravity overcomes the expansionary force of the Universe. Eventually, everything gets pulled back into a single, solitary point, much like another Big Bang. 

Its importance gives scientists plenty of reasons to fret about the Hubble Constant, but it has been notoriously difficult to pin down an exact number, and various experiments have resulted in some variance in the reading. It has never reached a precision threshold that the scientific community is willing to accept – commonly thought to be within 0.9%. In particular, two well-regarded measurement methods, cosmic microwave background radiation measurements and the distance ladder method, don’t agree on the value. 

Despite all the hype surrounding the coming of the commercial space age, NASA and other governmental agencies will still play a vital role in the early stages of getting much of the infrastructure up and running before commercial actors can come in. That role will primarily be filled by being the first (and sometimes only) customer for a wide variety of companies that hope to profit from exploiting space resources. 

Governments around the world are beginning to realize the critical role they will play in the potential new industrial age, and America’s House of Representatives took a step towards accepting that responsibility when it gave NASA 6 months to come up with a plan for developing a plan for electrical power infrastructure on the Moon. In response, NASA’s Principal Technologist for Power and Energy Storage, Dr. John H Scott, presented a preliminary plan for developing that infrastructure at the Space Power Workshop, held in Torrance, California, at the end of April.

The challenges of getting power on the Moon have been well documented. Sunlight isn’t consistent enough, and batteries that operate at freezing temperatures aren’t large enough for typical renewable energy plans to be viable at the Lunar South Pole, which will likely serve as the first landing site for NASA’s Artemis program. However, large amounts of power are needed for in-situ resource utilization, such as making rocket fuel to get landers back to Earth and effectively operate a base camp.

But the vision that the House of Representatives asked for looked past the preliminary Artemis missions to where there could potentially be a significant private industrial presence on the Moon. Dr. Scott breaks that vision down into three phases – the Artemie Base Camp phase, the ? phase where NASA is a primary customer of commercially available power services and an ? phase where NASA is one of many other (presumably commercial) customers that utilize existing power services.

In some surprisingly good graphics for a government presentation, Dr. Scott also lays out essential technology requirements for each phase and identifies what loads the technologies might be used to power. In the ? phase, the technologies range from fuel cells to heliostats, and they can be used to power anything from rovers to full-blown laboratories. 

While the SpaceX Crew Dragon is making regular trips to and from the International Space Station, the other vehicle NASA was planning to rely on for crew transportation keeps running into problems and delays. Boeing and NASA just announced another set of delays for the CST-100 Starliner spacecraft, pushing it even further back from its proposed July launch window — which was already years behind schedule.

Problems with its parachute lines and the electrical system were identified, and the program manager isn’t sure if Starliner will even fly by the end of 2023.

“We’ve been working to understand these issues,” said Mark Nappi, Boeing’s Starliner program manager, “and we’ve decided to stand down the preparation for the CFT (Crew Flight Test) mission in order to correct these problems.”

During reviews over the past several weeks, engineers uncovered two issues that can’t be fixed before mid-year. The “soft links” that connect parachute suspension lines to the spacecraft are not strong enough, and the tape that wraps electrical lines use a flammable adhesive.

The kicker is that tests on these items had been run previously and no one caught the problems until now.

While Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is one of the most well-known spectacles in the solar system, Jupiter’s clouds and stripes that are responsible for the planet’s weather patterns are highly regarded, as well. Though not nearly as visible in an amateur astronomy telescope, Jupiter’s multicolored, rotating, and swirling cloud stripes are a sight to behold for any astronomy fan when seen in up-close images. And, what makes these stripes unique is they have been observed to change color from time to time, but the question of what causes this color change to occur has remained elusive.

This is what a recent study published in Nature Astronomy hopes to address as an international team of researchers examine how Jupiter’s massive magnetic field could be responsible for Jupiter’s changing stripe colors. This study was led by Dr. Kumiko Hori of Kobe University and Dr. Chris Jones of the University of Leeds and holds the potential to help scientists better understand how a planet’s magnetic field could influence a planet’s weather patterns. In this case, Jupiter’s massive magnetic field influencing its massive, swirling clouds.

“If you look at Jupiter through a telescope, you see the stripes, which go round the equator along lines of latitude,” explains Dr. Jones. “There are dark and light belts that occur, and if you look a little bit more closely, you can see clouds zipping around carried by extraordinarily strong easterly and westerly winds. Near the equator, the wind blows eastward but as you change latitude a bit, either north or south, it goes westward. And then if you move a little bit further away it goes eastward again. This alternating pattern of eastward and westward winds is quite different from weather on Earth.”

While previous studies have demonstrated that Jupiter’s appearance is somehow altered by infrared fluctuations approximately 50 km (31 mi) below the gas cloud surface, this most recent study demonstrates the infrared fluctuations could be caused by Jupiter’s magnetic field, the source of which, like Earth, is far deeper inside the planet.

“Every four or five years, things change,” said Dr. Jones. “The colors of the belts can change and sometimes you see global upheavals when the whole weather pattern goes slightly crazy for a bit, and it has been a mystery as to why that happens.”

It has been over sixty years since the first Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) survey occurred. This was Project Ozma, a survey led by Dr. Frank Drake (who devised the Drake Equation) that used the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Green Bank, West Virginia, to listen for radio transmissions from Epsilon Eridani and Tau Ceti. While the search revealed nothing of interest, it paved the way for decades of research, theory, and attempts to find evidence of technological activity (aka. “technosignatures”).

The search continues today, with researchers using next-generation instruments and analytical methods to find the “needle in the cosmic haystack.” This is the purpose behind Breakthrough Listen Investigation for Periodic Spectral Signals (BLIPSS), a collaborative SETI project led by Cornell graduate student Akshay Suresh to look for technosignatures at the center of the Milky Way. In a recent paper, Suresh and his team shared their initial findings, which were made possible thanks to data obtained by the Greenbank Observatory and a proprietary algorithm they developed.

Suresh is a Ph.D. candidate at the Cornell Center for Astrophysics and Planetary Science who leads the BLIPPS campaign, a collaboration between Cornell University, the SETI Institute, and Breakthrough Listen. He and his colleagues were joined by astrophysicists from the Cahill Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics, the Institute for Mathematics, Astrophysics, and Particle Physics (IMAPP), the Institute of Space Sciences and Astronomy, and the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR). Their paper, “A 4–8 GHz Galactic Center Search for Periodic Technosignatures,” appeared on May 30th in The Astronomical Journal.

The Karl Jansky Very Large Array at night, with the Milky Way visible in the sky. Credit: NRAO/AUI/NSF; J. Hellerman

To date, all SETI surveys have been dedicated to looking for evidence of artificial radio transmissions. The accepted theory is that radio signatures would fall into one of two categories: narrowband intentional beacon emissions and broadband radiation leakage from radio transmitters. Of the two, the spectrotemporal characteristics (frequency over time) of radiation leakage are much harder to speculate about and likely to be weaker. For this reason, most modern SETI efforts have focused on looking for wideband searches for narrowband beacons from planetary systems or neighboring galaxies.

China continues to establish new milestones in space. In recent years, the China National Space Agency (CNSA) has begun assembling the Long March-9 (CZ-9), the country’s first reusable super-heavy launch vehicle; the Tianwen-1 mission became the first Chinese orbiter, lander, and rover combination to reach Mars, and their super-secret spaceplane completed its second flight (after spending 276 days in space). China has also made significant progress in terms of human spaceflight, especially where the Tiangong space station is concerned.

Earlier this week (Tues. May 30th), the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) took another major step when it launched the country’s sixteenth mission (Shenzou-16) to Tiangong atop a Long March-2F (CZ-2F) rocket. This mission delivered three taikonauts to the space station and performed the most complicated docking maneuver ever attempted. The mission highlights included successfully testing the Shenzou’s upgraded instruments and systems, which allowed the spacecraft to autonomously rendezvous with the station under less-than-ideal conditions.

The Shenzou-16 spacecraft carried Jing Haipeng and Zhu Yangzhou, both members of the People’s Liberation Army Astronaut Corps (PLAAC), and Gui Haichao, a payload specialist and professor at Beihang University. The spacecraft docked with the space station at 4:29 am Beijing Time on May 30th (01:29 pm PDT; 04:29 pm EDT on Monday, May 29th). The autonomous fast docking process, the most complicated one to date for the CMSA, took about six and a half hours and consisted of six autonomous orbit adjustments.

A still from a camera aboard the Shenzhou-16 spaceship showing the China Space Station, May 30th, 2023. Credit: China Media Group

During the maneuver, the space station was blocking too much sunlight, making it more difficult to determine the dock’s position. As Yao Jian, the managing designer of the docking subsystem, shared via the state-owned television network CGTN, Shenzou’s new light sensors and other upgraded systems compensated for this and assisted with the complicated maneuver:

Whenever something happens with Betelgeuse, speculations about it exploding as a supernova proliferate. It would be cool if it did. We’re far enough away to suffer no consequences, so it’s fun to imagine the sky lighting up like that for months.

Now the red supergiant star has brightened by almost 50%, and that has the speculation ramping up again.

Betelgeuse will explode as a supernova. On that, there is universal agreement. But the question of when is less certain. The star’s behaviour is confounding. How can puny humans find out?

Betelgeuse isn’t only a red supergiant, it’s also a pulsating semiregular variable star. That means there’s some periodicity in its brightness changes, though the amplitudes can vary. It has an approximately 400-day cycle where its brightness changes. It also has a shorter 125-day cycle, another 230-day cycle, and a whopping 2200-day cycle, all determined by pulsations. All those cycles can make the star difficult to understand clearly.

A couple of years ago, Betelgeuse dimmed, and people wondered what that meant. It turns out that the star’s brightness didn’t actually change. Instead, the star had ejected material from its surface that cooled into a dust cloud and blocked the light. The episode is called ‘The Great Dimming.’

It’s almost impossible to over-emphasize the primal, raging, natural power of a star. Our Sun may appear benign in simple observations, but with the advanced scientific instruments at our disposal in modern times, we know differently. In observations outside the narrow band of light our eyes can see, the Sun appears as an enraged, infuriated sphere, occasionally hurling huge jets of plasma into space, some of which slam into Earth.

Jets of plasma slamming into Earth isn’t something to be celebrated (unless you’re in a weird cult); it can cause all kinds of problems.

Some scientists are dedicated to studying the Sun, partly because of the danger it poses. It would be nice to know when the Sun is going to throw a tantrum and if we’ll be in its path. We have multiple spacecraft dedicated to studying the Sun in detail. The Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO,) the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO,) and the Parker Solar Probe are all engaged in solar observations.

The Sun’s mighty magnetic fields play a huge role in the Sun’s outbursts, though scientists are still working out the details. A new study published in Nature Astronomy is helping scientists understand the magnetic fields in more detail. It’s titled “Numerical evidence for a small-scale dynamo approaching solar magnetic Prandtl numbers,” and the first author is Jörn Warnecke, a senior postdoctoral researcher at Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS.)

The solar dynamo is responsible for the Sun’s magnetic fields. The solar dynamo has two parts: the small-scale dynamo and the large-scale dynamo. The problem is solar researchers have not been able to model them yet, at least not in full detail. Problematically, they can’t confirm that a small-scale dynamo (SSD), which is ubiquitous in astrophysical bodies throughout the Universe, can even be generated by the conditions in the Sun. That’s obviously a big problem because a small-scale dynamo would have a huge influence on the Sun’s behaviour.

When astronomers discovered WASP-18b in 2009, they uncovered one of the most unusual planets ever found. It’s ten times as massive as Jupiter is, it’s tidally locked to its Sun-like star, and it completes an orbit in less than one Earth day, about 23 hours.

Now astronomers have pointed the JWST and its powerful NIRSS instrument at the ultra-Hot Jupiter and mapped its extraordinary atmosphere.

Ever since its discovery, astronomers have been keenly interested in WASP-18b. For one thing, it’s massive. At ten times more massive than Jupiter, the planet is nearing brown dwarf territory. It’s also extremely hot, with its dayside temperature exceeding 2750 C (4900 F.) Not only that, but it’s likely to spiral to its doom and collide with its star sometime in the next one million years.

For these reasons and more, astronomers are practically obsessed with it. They’ve made extensive efforts to map the exoplanet’s atmosphere and uncover its details with the Hubble and the Spitzer. But those space telescopes, as powerful as they are, were unable to collect data detailed enough to reveal the atmosphere’s properties conclusively.

Now that the JWST is in full swing, it was inevitable that someone’s request to point it at WASP-18b would be granted. Who in the Astronomocracy would say no?

Anyone who’s ever lived along a coastline or been at sea knows the effects of tsunamis. And, they appreciate all the early warning they can get if one’s on the way. Now, NASA’s GNSS Upper Atmospheric Real-time Disaster and Alert Network (GUARDIAN) is using global navigation systems to measure the effect these ocean disturbances have on our atmosphere. The system’s measurements could provide a very effective early warning tool for people to get to higher ground in the path of a tsunami.

Earthquakes and undersea volcanic eruptions often trigger tsunamis. Essentially, those tectonic events displace huge amounts of ocean water. During the resulting tsunami, huge areas of the ocean’s surface rise and fall. As they do, the ocean movement displaces the overlying column of air. That sets off ripples in the atmosphere. Think of it as if the air is responding by creating its own tsunami. It actually does that in response to fast-moving storms and their squall lines. Meteorologists call those reactions “meteotsunamis.” They can push water around into dangerous waves, which then cause flooding and other damage. That’s very similar to tsunamis generated by earthquakes.

What NASA’s Doing to Predict Tsunamis

Weather forecasters can generally predict bad weather leading to meteotsunamis, but that’s not the case for earthquakes and underwater volcanoes and the tsunamis they trigger. So, the NASA project aims to provide advance notice after a temblor or a volcanic eruption.

The GUARDIAN system taps into a constant data stream emitted by clusters of global positioning satellites and other wayfinding stations orbiting Earth. They give real-time information about changes in water heights in the ocean and surface measurements of land masses. Those data-rich radio signals get collected by ground stations and sent to NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. There, it gets analyzed by the Global Differential network, which constantly improves the real-time positional accuracy of features on the planet.

So, when a tectonic event happens, the system is alerted to look for changes in the air masses over the oceans. Displaced ripples in the air move out in all directions as low-frequency sound and gravity waves. Those vibrations rush to the top of the atmosphere within just a few minutes. There, they crash into the charged particles of the ionosphere. That distorts signals from the GPS satellites, and those distorted signals tell the system that something’s going on down below.

How do you weigh a galaxy? It’s an astronomical challenge, particularly if it’s the galaxy you call home. It turns out there are several ways to get a handle on the mass of the Milky Way, and a recent study summarizes these methods to present the best value.

One method is to look at the motion of stars in the galaxy. Most Milky Way stars follow a roughly circular path around the galactic center. Just as planets orbit the Sun, stars orbit the galaxy. Since gravity is the force holding stars in their orbit, you can use a star’s speed and distance from the center to determine the mass within its orbit. Not all stars have circular orbits, but they do on average. So you can plot the speed vs distance from the center for known stars, and get what is known as the rotation curve. Measurements of this curve in the Milky Way and other galaxies were the first evidence that galaxies had much more mass than could be accounted for by visible stars, leading to the idea of dark matter.

One of the problems with the rotation curve method is that we can only measure stars to a certain distance. We now know that most of our galaxy’s mass isn’t concentrated at the center, but rather extends outward into a galactic halo. We can estimate the mass of the halo from the rotation curve, but we can also look at the motion of globular clusters.

Globular clusters are bright dense clusters of stars. Since stars within a globular cluster are gravitationally bound, these clusters move around the galaxy like a single object. They are found in a sphere surrounding the Milky Way, so measuring their motion helps us measure the mass of the galactic halo.

To measure the outer region of the galactic halo, we can look at the motion of satellite galaxies such as the Magellanic Clouds. There are about 60 small galaxies within about 1.4 million light-years of the Milky Way. Not all of them are in orbit around our galaxy, but many of them are. Since they lay outside our galactic halo, their orbital motions are determined by all of our galaxy’s mass. The only downside of this approach is that with only a few dozen orbiting galaxies, the result isn’t particularly accurate.

One of the most interesting (and confounding) discoveries made by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is the existence of “impossibly large galaxies.” As noted in a previous article, these galaxies existed during the “Cosmic Dawn,” the period that coincided with the end of the “Cosmic Dark Age” (roughly 1 billion years after the Big Bang). This period is believed to hold the answers to many cosmological mysteries, not the least of which is what the earliest galaxies in the Universe looked like. But after Webb obtained images of these primordial galaxies, astronomers noticed something perplexing.

The galaxies were much larger than what the most widely accepted cosmological model predicts! Since then, astronomers and astrophysicists have been racking their brains to explain how these galaxies could have formed. Recently, a team of astrophysicists from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Jerusalem published a theoretical model that addresses the mystery of these massive galaxies. According to their findings, the prevalence of special conditions in these galaxies (at the time) allowed highly-efficient rates of star formation without interference from other stars.

The research team was led by Professor Avishai Dekel from The Racah Institute of Physics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the UC Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics (SCIPP). He was joined by colleagues from the Racah Institute and Tel Aviv University, Dr. Kartick Sarkar, Professor Yuval Birnboim, Dr. Nir Mandelker, and Dr. Zhaozhou Li. Their results were presented in a paper titled “Efficient formation of massive galaxies at cosmic dawn by feedback-free starbursts,” recently published by the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

This image shows one of the most distant galaxies known, called GN-108036, dating back to 750 million years after the Big Bang that created our universe. Credit: NASA/ESA/JPL-Caltech/STScI/University of Tokyo

According to the Lambda-Cold Dark Matter (LCDM) model, which best explains what we have observed of the cosmos, the first stars and galaxies formed during the “Cosmic Dark Age.” The name refers to how the only sources of photons during this period were from the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) and those released by the clouds of neutral hydrogen that shrouded the Universe. Once galaxies began to form, the radiation from their hot and massive stars (1000 times more massive than our Sun) began reionizing the neutral hydrogen.

What happens when you burn iron in space? The European Space Agency is torching iron powder in microgravity, to find out. They aren’t doing it for the fun of it, but to understand something called “discrete burning.” It turns out that this process might enable more efficient iron-burning furnaces right here on Earth. It could eventually join other renewable energy sources as a way to combat the release of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere.

So, why burn iron? In astrophysics, when a hugely massive star gets to the “iron-burning” phase, it spells catastrophe in the form of a supernova. That’s because it takes more energy to consume the iron in the star’s core than the star can put out. But, “burning” iron in microgravity is a different chemical process.

When you burn something, you’re adding oxygen to the material you want to burn. The process gives off heat, plus other byproducts. If you’re burning wood or something like that, the by-products are ash and carbon dioxide (a greenhouse gas).

When iron (or other metal) powder burns, it reacts with air to form oxides. In the process, they create a lot of energy (and light). In the case of iron, the leftover is basically iron oxide—good old rust. And, people can reprocess the rust to remove the oxygen. Essentially, you get iron back. No carbon dioxide gets produced and no other dangerous gases show up in the process.

“The best way to reduce carbon emissions into the atmosphere is not to emit it at all,” explained ESA engineer Antonio Verga, who worked on flying the team’s experiments aboard TEXUS sounding rockets.

A recent study submitted to Acta Astronautica examines the prospect of designing a Venus mission flight plan that would involve visiting a nearby asteroid after performing a gravity assist maneuver at Venus but prior to final contact with the planet. The study was conducted by Vladislav Zubko, who is a researcher and PhD Candidate at the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Science (RAS) and has experience studying potential flight plans to various planetary bodies throughout the solar system.

“The motivation behind this study was to enhance the efficiency and success rate of Venus missions by including an asteroid flyby in the flight scheme,” Zubko tells Universe Today. “As widely acknowledged, Venus’s particular atmospheric conditions make a mission to the planet a challenging prospect, with designing a spacecraft and achieving a landing being notably difficult tasks. Additionally, Venus’ slow rotation, taking 243 Earth days, restricts potential landing sites on its surface.”

For the study, Zubko examined the potential for conducting flybys of 117 asteroid candidates with diameters greater than 1 km (0.62 miles) using the Solar System Dynamics catalog from NASA JPL, referring it his plan as an Earth-Venus-Asteroid-Venus flight plan that could potentially occur using launch dates between 2029 and 2050. Using a variety of calculations, Zubko found 53 mission scenarios with 35 asteroid targets between 2029 and 2050 where a spacecraft could encounter an asteroid while en route to Venus.

Graph from the study displaying the number of mission scenarios per year between 2029 and 2050. (Credit: Zubko (2023), Figure 4)

Zubko tells Universe Today he believes the “most promising” asteroids for scientific exploration for these mission scenarios are 3554 Amun due to its a M-class (also called M-type) classification, 3753 Cruithne since it exhibits a 1:1 orbital resonance ratio with the Earth, and 5731 Zeus since it’s the largest asteroid examined in the study at 5.23 km (3.25 miles) in diameter. M-class asteroids like 3554 Amun are intriguing targets for scientific exploration—and potential resources for Earth—since they are comprised largely of metal phases (i.e., iron-nickel) and are believed to be the source of iron meteorites that have been found on Earth and Mars. For 3753 Cruithne, a 1:1 orbital resonance with Earth means it completes one orbit around the Sun for every one orbit of Earth. Essentially, their orbital periods are exactly the same, otherwise known as a co-orbital object.

NASA’s Kepler spacecraft ended its observations in October 2018 after nine and a half years, a solid six years beyond its planned duration. It discovered 2,711 confirmed exoplanets and another 2,056 exoplanet candidates as of August 2022.

Now, astronomers at MIT and the University of Wisconsin uncovered three more exoplanets in the data from Kepler’s final days of observations. They needed the help of dedicated amateurs to do it.

Kepler was still operating when NASA launched Kepler’s successor, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS,) in August 2018. When Kepler’s mission ended later that year, it passed the planet-hunting baton over to TESS. TESS is doing great, but Kepler still accounts for over half of the confirmed exoplanets we know of. That’s impressive, and the number ticks a little higher with the newest three.

Kepler worked hard right up until its end. As it ran out of fuel for its reaction control system in October 2018, it kept watching stars in its targeted part of the sky for the tell-tale dips in light that signal a passing planet. It spotted three dips around three separate stars in the same section of the sky. Two of those dips are now confirmed exoplanets, and the other is a candidate awaiting confirmation.

A new paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society presents the findings. It’s titled “Kepler’s last planet discoveries: two new planets and one single-transit candidate from K2 campaign 19.” The lead author is Elyse Incha, from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Other authors come from NASA, CfA Harvard and Smithsonian, and the University of North Carolina. Amateur astronomers Tom Jacobs and Daryll LaCourse are also part of the team.

The commercial space sector (aka. NewSpace) is one of the fastest-growing industries of the 21st century. In the past twenty years, what was once considered an ambitious venture or far-off prospect has become a rapidly-accelerating reality. Today, companies are conducting launches using their own rockets and spacecraft, often from their own facilities, to send everything from satellites and cargo to astronauts (commercial and professional) into space. The growing number of launch providers has also led to a dramatic increase in demand for launch-related services.

This includes retrieval operations designed to provide launch flexibility and safe retrieval. This is the purpose behind The Spaceport Company, a Virginia-based aerospace company dedicated to creating a global network of mobile, sea-based launch and landing site systems. On Monday, May 22nd, the company successfully tested its prototype platform by conducting the first-ever commercial rocket launches from U.S. water. This test demonstrated the potential for mobile sea platforms to ease congestion at on-shore launch facilities and expedite the delivery of payloads to orbit.

The Spaceport Company is an emerging leader in developing mobile sea spaceports that enable cost-effective launch services to meet the needs of the modern space sector. This includes the NewSpace industry, which relies on a high-cadence launch schedule and rapid turnaround in proximity to manufacturing sites, and the needs of the Defense sector, which requires responsive spaceports that are rapid, survivable, and distributed. The company’s infrastructure also combines proprietary hardware and software with a unique process of government pre-approvals.

During the demonstration, multiple launch vehicles took off from the platform in the Gulf of Mexico, allowing the company to test its infrastructure and all the regulatory procedure that go into orbital-class launches. According to a statement released by the company, this included: “regulatory approvals from the FAA and U.S. Coast Guard, scheduling, control of public access, range surveillance, hazard clearance, airspace integration, anomaly response, and remote launch vehicle ignition at sea.”

The successful demonstration also had the bonus of being on schedule and within budget. As The Spaceport Company founder and CEO Tom Marotta said in the statement:

A panel of independent experts took a first-ever look at what NASA could bring to the study of UFO sightings — now known as unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAPs — and said the space agency will have to up its game.

The 16-member panel’s chair, David Spergel, said he and his colleagues were “struck by the limited nature of the data.”

“Many events had insufficient data,” said Spergel, an astrophysicist who is the president of the Simons Foundation. “In order to get a better understanding, we will need to have high-quality data — data where we understand its provenance, data from multiple sensors.”

During today’s public hearing, panelists said NASA could contribute to the UAP debate by setting standards for sighting data, creating a crowdsourcing platform for sightings, and reducing the stigma that has discouraged people from reporting and studying anomalous sightings. Some of that stigma was experienced by the panelists themselves.

“It’s disheartening to note that several of them have been subjected to online abuse due to their decision to participate on this panel,” said Daniel Evans, NASA’s assistant deputy associate administrator for research, who served as the space agency’s liaison to the panel. “A NASA security team is actively addressing this issue.”

A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a pair of researchers from the University of Florida (UF) examine orbital eccentricities for exoplanets orbiting red dwarf (M dwarf) stars and determined that one-third of them—which encompass hundreds of millions throughout the Milky Way—could exist within their star’s habitable zone (HZ), which is that approximate distance from their star where liquid water can exist on the surface. The researchers determined the remaining two-thirds of exoplanets orbiting red dwarfs are too hot for liquid water to exist on their surfaces due to tidal extremes, resulting in a sterilization of the planetary surface.

Artist’s illustration of a young red dwarf star with three exoplanets orbiting around it. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

“I think this result is really important for the next decade of exoplanet research, because eyes are shifting toward this population of stars,” said Sheila Sagear, who is a PhD student at UF and lead author of the study. “These stars are excellent targets to look for small planets in an orbit where it’s conceivable that water might be liquid and therefore the planet might be habitable.”

For the study, Sagear and her advisor, Dr. Sarah Ballard, analyzed the orbital eccentricities of 163 exoplanets orbiting red dwarf stars across 101 systems using data from NASA’s Kepler mission. For context, red dwarf stars are approximately the size of Jupiter, so they’re much smaller than our own Sun. This smaller size means red dwarfs give off far less energy and heat than our Sun, meaning the HZ exists much closer to the star, resulting in shorter orbital periods for planets that orbit within the HZ.

Illustration depicting habitable zones for various types of stars displaying too hot (red), too cold (blue), and just right (green) for liquid water to exist on a planetary surface. Since red dwarfs are cooler than our own Sun, their habitable zone is closer to the star. (Credit: NASA/Kepler Mission/Dana Berry)

NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter on Mars has exceeded everyone’s expectations, recently completing its 51st flight when it was supposed to fly just a few times as a demonstration mission. But flights 50 and 51 almost didn’t happen.

In a recent blog post, Travis Brown, Chief Engineer for Ingenuity shared how the team lost contact with the tiny rotorcraft for six excruciating days.

At first, they were not overly concerned when communications ceased from the helicopter on Sol 755. About a year ago, a brief two-day communication glitch occurred because Ingenuity experienced insufficient battery charge as night fell at the start of the Martian winter. This reduced voltage reset the mission clock, causing the helicopter’s system to be out of sync with Perseverance rover. While the team quickly figured out the issue, because of Ingenuity’s off-the shelf batteries, they expected this issue could happen again.

But now, this time was different.

“In more than 700 sols operating the helicopter on Mars, not once had we ever experienced a total radio blackout,” Brown wrote. “Even in the worst communications environments, we had always seen some indication of activity.”

Robots will be one of the keys to the expanding in-space economy. As launch costs decrease, hopefully significantly when Starship and other massive lift systems come online, the most significant barrier to entry for the space economy will finally come down. So what happens then? Two acronyms have been popping up in the literature with increasing frequency – in-space servicing, assembly, and manufacturing (ISAM) and On-orbit servicing (OOS). Over a series of articles, we’ll look at some papers detailing what those acronyms mean and where they might be going shortly. First, we’ll examine how robots fit into the equation.

Space robots have been around since 1981 when the Shuttle Remote Manipulator System (SRMS) was launched with the space shuttle, whose astronauts then operated them. They have expanded far beyond that original use case in the last forty years, playing an increasingly important role in everything from assembling the International Space Station (ISS) to more recently proof-of-concept missions to service a failing satellite in Earth’s orbit. 

A new paper from the State Key Laboratory of Robotics and Systems at the Harbin Institute of Technology in China details some of the work that still needs to be done to realize the dream of fully functional robots in space. It breaks that work down into five different functional areas.

First, and one familiar to anyone who spends time with autonomous robots, is vision. Vision systems are consistently being improved here on Earth, especially those tied to the operation of autonomous cars. However, while the visual surrounding might not be near as chaotic in space, it can be challenging to have a robot visually understand what it is looking at, especially if a satellite is tumbling uncontrollably. 

Pattern recognition, such as circles placed around the docking ports of a satellite expecting to be serviced (known in the jargon as “cooperative”), is still difficult. Partly that is because the computational load of doing the recognition algorithm must be done on the robot itself. That requires increased computational power, directly related to increased power consumption and heat that must be dealt with. Recognizing an “un-cooperative” satellite that isn’t designed to accept help from a robot is even more difficult, especially in real-time.