Space News & Blog Articles

What are the best methods to explore Valles Marineris on Mars, which is the largest canyon in the solar system? This is what a recent study presented at the 56th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference hopes to address as a team of researchers investigated how helicopters could be used to explore Valles Marineris, which could offer insights into Mars’ chaotic past. This study has the potential to help scientists and engineers develop new methods for studying Mars’s history and whether the Red Planet once had life as we know it.

How can nanosatellites help advance lunar exploration and settlement? This is what a recent study presented at the 56th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference hopes to address as a team of researchers from Grahaa Space in India investigated the pros, cons, and applications for using nanosatellites on the Moon. This study has the potential to help scientists, engineers, mission planners, and future lunar astronauts develop and test new technologies for advancing lunar exploration, and possibly beyond the Moon.

What methods can be employed to send a spacecraft to Uranus despite the former’s immense distance from Earth? This is what a recent study presented at the 56th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference hopes to address as a team of scientists investigated ways to cut the travel time to the second most distant planet from the Sun. This study has the potential to help scientists, engineers, and mission planners develop low-cost and novel techniques for deep space travel while conducting cutting-edge science.

We tend to think of Extraterrestrial Intelligences (ETIs)—if they exist—as civilizations that have overcome the problems that still plague us. They're advanced, peaceful, disease-free technological societies that enjoy absolute political stability as they accomplish feats of impeccable engineering. Can that really be true in a Universe where entropy sets the stage upon which events unfold?

A team of researchers led by the Los Alamos National Laboratory examined the possibility that the jets coming from collapsing stars could be responsible for creating the heaviest elements in the Universe.

As young stars form, they exert a powerful influence on their surroundings and create complex interactions between them and their environments. As they gobble up gas and dust, they generate a rotating disk of material. This protoplanetary disk is where planets form, and new research shows that stars can feed too quickly and end up regurgitating material back into the disk.

The Juno spacecraft circling in Jovian space is the planetary science gift that just keeps on giving. Although it's spending a lot of time in the strong (and damaging) Jovian radiation belts, the spacecraft's instruments are hanging in there quite well. In the process, they're peering into Jupiter's cloud tops and looking beneath the surface of the volcanic moon Io.

Has your dinner time conversations been dragging a bit of late? Feel like raising its knowledge level to a bit higher than the usual synopsis of the most recent reality TV show? Then take the challenge presented by Sean Carroll in his book "The Biggest Ideas in the Universe – Space, Time and Motion". Using this, your conversation might soon be sparkling with grand thoughts about modern physics, time travel, going faster than light and the curvature of the universe.

The White House Releases its 2026 Budget Request for NASA. Cuts to SLS, Gateway and Orion

There's no better word for this image of the Sun than Spectacular, which means something impressive, dramatic, or remarkable that creates a spectacle or visual impact. It comes from the Latin word spectaculum, which means a show, spectacle, or public exhibition. Ancient Romans would agree with the word choice if you could somehow show it to them.

Lately, there's been plenty of progress in 3D printing objects from the lunar regolith. We've reported on several projects that have attempted to do so, with varying degrees of success. However, most of them require some additive, such as a polymer or salt water, as a binding agent. Recently, a paper from Julien Garnier and their co-authors at the University of Toulouse attempted to make compression-hardened 3D-printed objects using nothing but the regolith itself.

Images of Mars never cease to amaze. This latest image of NASA’s Curiosity Rover captured by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows the rover as a dark speck and the end of a long trail of tracks. It was rattling along at a speed of 0.16 km/h across the Gediz Vallis Channel and was headed towards a region that could have been formed by water billions of years ago. The weather on Mars won’t allow the tracks to persist though so they are likely to last for only a few months.

The Milky Way has more than 30 known satellite galaxies. The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are the largest and most well-known; other lesser-known ones, like the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy, are also on the list. Astronomers think there are many more small satellites that are difficult to detect but essential in understanding the Milky Way. The Vera Rubin Observatory should help astronomers find many more of them.

Take a look at the Moon through binoculars or a telescope and its clear that its been bombarded through history by space rocks. Some of the impacts are energetic enough that debris is ejected from the surface facer than the Moon’s escape velocity. Much of this rock finds its way to Earth and now, a team of researchers announce they have been simulating these events. They simulated asteroid impacts and tracked the debris that escaped the lunar surface and were surprised at just how much of the ejecta found its way to Earth.

Dimethyl Sulfide (DMS) has been in the news again, this time for its discovery in the atmosphere of the hycean world K2-18b as a potential biosignature. In an interesting twist, astronomers have also detected DMS in comets and in giant molecular clouds. It shows there must be an abiotic way for this chemical to be produced. A team of researchers have studied DMS and developed different gas phase reactions that could produce this chemical and explain its presence that doesn’t require life.

An Ultra-Diffuse Galaxy Found With Almost No Dark Matter

We associate complex chemistry with planets or other bodies, where energy and matter interact in dynamic associations. But as science advances, researchers are finding prebiotic chemistry in a wider variety of places, including in space itself. New research shows that some prebiotic chemicals, part of the recipe for life itself, can form in the cold vacuum of space.

About 380,000 years after the Big Bang, the first atoms formed. The first light of what we now see as the cosmic microwave background was released, and the primordial hydrogen and helium grew cold and dark. The cosmos entered a dark age for about 100 million years until the first stars and galaxies started to form. You could say the rise of galaxies marked cosmic morning. But star formation didn't really kick into gear for another 2-3 billion years, during what astronomers call cosmic noon. This period can be difficult to observe, but a new study gives us an unprecedented view of this epoch.

Telescopes can have more than one sensor. Those sensors can utilize some of the same infrastructure, like lenses and mirrors, and specialize in collecting different data. A good example of this is the Inouye Solar Telescope (IST). It is the largest solar telescope in the world, with a primary mirror diameter of 4 meters. It also has five separate instruments, four of which are currently in operation. The latest of these to come online is the Visible Tunable Filtergraph (VTF), which just collected its first light according to a press release by the Max Planck Institute for Solar Research, one of the project partners.

Looking up at the night sky, it’s reasonable to believe that our Solar System is largely empty after all the only things easily visible are the planets. In reality its a cosmic shooting gallery and it’s just a matter of time before an asteroid slams into Earth. A team of scientists propose that space agencies develop a rapid-response flyby reconnaissance mission to reach potential asteroid threats within 2.5 years of detection.

Occasionally, the Universe seems to literally smile upon us. If skies are clear Friday morning on April 25th, early rising sky watchers may witness a rare scene, as brilliant Venus and fainter Saturn form the ‘eyes’ and a thin crescent Moon nearby completes the ‘grin’ low to the east at dawn.