Space News & Blog Articles

How can thermoelectric generators (TEGs) help advance future lunar surface habitats? This is what a recent study published in Acta Astronautica hopes to address as a team of researchers from the Republic of Korea investigated a novel technique for improving power efficiency and reliability under the Moon’s harsh conditions. This study has the potential to help mission planners, engineers, and future astronauts develop technologies necessary for deep space human exploration to the Moon and beyond.

Since the turn of the century, the growing impact of Climate Change has inspired plans for space settlement. For many, establishing habitats in space and on other celestial bodies is a matter of survival, of creating "backup locations" for humanity so no single cataclysmic fate could lead to our extinction. This presents many challenges since spaceflight presents numerous hazards, including radiation exposure and the physiological and psychological effects of time spent in microgravity. Ongoing research aboard the International Space Station (ISS) has shown that these effects include muscle atrophy, bone density loss, and genetic changes.

Comets are like the archeological sites of the solar system. They formed early on, and their composition helps us understand what the area around the early Sun was like, potentially even before any planets were formed. A new paper from researchers at a variety of US and European institutions used the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) to capture detailed spatial spectral images of comet 12P/Pons-Brooks, which is very similar to the famous Halley’s comet, and might hold clues to where the water on the Earth came from.

A set of instruments shut off almost 50 years ago are still producing useful results. It’s the seismometers left by the Apollo missions to monitor moonquakes, which as the name suggests are earthquakes but on the Moon. First off, the Apollo seismometers were the first to reveal that the Moon does indeed have quakes, which is an impressive achievement in its own right. And once we realized that the Moon shakes, we’ve been able to use the natural seismic vibrations produced inside the Moon to map out its interior structure.

The 33rd SpaceX commercial resupply mission will launch from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Sunday, August 24th, for the International Space Station (ISS). Along with a regular complement of sundries, this mission will carry numerous science investigations, like a 3D bioprinted implantable medical device, engineered liver tissues, and another 3D metal printing experiment. In addition, the mission will send an important medical investigation examining potential bone density loss, a common health effect that comes from extended periods spent in microgravity.

As missions like Kepler and TESS discovered more rocky exoplanets in recent years, scientists looked forward to the launch of the JWST. The powerful space telescope has the ability gather infrared spectra of exoplanet atmospheres, a key need in understanding the planets being discovered. It was hoped that these atmospheric characterizations would advance our understanding of habitability.

Neil Armstrong almost made a mistake. He had found an interesting rock sticking out of a formation. Curious to see what the rock was made of, he needed to examine its interior more closely. So he reached for his hammer and took a swing. The rock was far more brittle than he anticipated, and instead of cleaving in two it shattered. One of those shards flew away with so much force that it left behind a bloody gash in this forearm.

The JWST has another feather in its cap. The perceptive space telescope has taken a break from peering into the ancient, distant Universe and probing the formation and evolution of galaxies. It's turned its gaze closer to home, examining Uranus for the presence of undiscovered moons, and it found one.

Earth’s atmosphere is large, extending out to around 10,000 km from the surface of the planet. It’s so large, in fact, that scientists break it into five separate sections, and there’s one particular section that hasn’t got a whole lot of attention due to the difficulty in maintaining any craft there. Planes and balloons can visit the troposphere and stratosphere, the two sections closest to the ground, while satellites can sit in orbit in the thermosphere and exosphere, allowing for a platform for consistent observations. But the mesosphere, the line section in the middle, is too close to have a stable orbit, but too sparse in air for traditional airplanes or balloons to work. As a result, we don’t have a lot of data on it, but it impacts climate and weather forecasting, so scientists have simply had to make a lot of assumptions about what it's like up there. But a new study from researchers at Harvard and the University of Chicago might have found a way to put stable sensing platforms into the mesosphere, using a novel flight mechanism known as photophoresis.

NASA's Psyche Mission launched in October 2023 to rendezvous with the asteroid of the same name. The Psyche asteroid is a metal-rich asteroid that could be the remnant core of a planetesimal that had its outer layers stripped away. It's due to reach the asteroid and begin orbiting it in 2029.

When the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) commenced operations, it provided the first views of the period known as Cosmic Dawn. This cosmological epoch, which took place between 50 million and one billion years after the Big Bang, was when the first stars and galaxies in the Universe formed. What Webb's observations revealed of this period surprised and intrigued scientists. In addition to spotting numerous "Little Red Dots" (LRDs), particularly bright and red galaxies, it also observed the "seeds" of Supermassive Black Holes (SMBHs).

There are things astrophysicists know and things they don't know about brown dwarfs. They know that as they were forming and accreting mass, they failed to gain enough mass to trigger hydrogen fusion and become stars. But they're too massive to be gas giant planets like Jupiter because they do fuse some deuterium. So brown dwarfs are stuck in an astrophysical no-man's-land between star and planet. They're often referred to as 'failed stars'.

The U.S. Department of Defense’s mini-shuttle heads to orbit once again Thursday night.

In May 2027, NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will launch to space. Appropriately named after the "Mother of Hubble," the telescope will use its 2.4-meter (7.9 ft) wide field of view primary mirror and advanced instruments to investigate the deeper mysteries of the cosmos. Roman will spend 75% of its observing time over its five-year primary mission conducting three core community surveys selected by the scientific community. Among them, Roman will conduct a High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey (HLTDS) to detect tens of thousands of type Ia supernovae.

Sometimes inspiration can strike from the most unexpected places. It can result in a cross-pollination between ideas commonly used in one field but applied to a completely different one. That might have been the case with a recent paper on lightsail design from researchers at the University of Nottingham that used techniques typically used in video games to develop a new and improved structure of a lightsail.

How do tidal forces determine a planet’s orbital evolution, specifically planets in the habitable zone? This is what a recently submitted study hopes to address as an international team of researchers investigated how tidal forces far more powerful than experienced on Earth could influence orbital evolution of habitable zone planets with highly eccentric orbits around low-mass stars. This study has the potential to help researchers better understand the formation and evolution of exoplanets, specifically regarding where we could find life beyond Earth.

Interactions between supernovae and black holes must be exceedingly rare. But that's the only explanation for a very strange explosion found with the Zwicky Transient Facility. In July 2023, the ZTF spotted strange light signals about 730 million light-years from Earth, and AI helped astronomers unravel what they were seeing.

The Three Body Problem isn’t just the name of a viral Netflix series or a Hugo Award winning sci-fi book. It also represents a really problem in astrodynamics - and one that can cause headaches to mission planners in terms of its complexity, but also one that offers the promise of an easier way to enter stable orbits that might otherwise be possible. A new paper from researchers at the Beijing Institute of Technology shows one way those orbital maneuvers might be enhanced while exploring planetary systems - by using a gravity assist from its moons.

In 2020, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's (JAXA) Hayabusa2 spacecraft completed its primary mission when it returned samples of asteroid Ryugu to Earth. In 2023, NASA's OSIRIS-REx also completed its primary mission by returning samples of asteroid Bennu to Earth. Scientists in labs around the world have been studying those samples and have uncovered some surprises.

In the past decade, astronomers have witnessed three interstellar objects (ISOs) passing through the Solar System. This included the enigmatic 'Oumuamua in 2017, the interstellar comet 2I/Borisov in 2019, and 3I/ATLAS in July 2025. This latest object also appears to be a comet based on recent observations that showed it was actively releasing water vapor as it neared the Sun. The detection of these objects, which were previously theorized but never observed, has piqued interest in the origins of ISOs, their dynamics, and where they may be headed once they leave the Solar System.

Exoplanet habitability depends on a whole host of factors, with liquid water at the top of the list. It also needs a stable atmosphere, the right chemistry, and possibly even things like plate tectonics or other geological activity. Planetary magnetic fields are a critical part of the formula, too, but detecting them from Earth's surface is difficult.