Space News & Blog Articles

It is an exciting time for astronomers and cosmologists. Since the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have been treated to the most vivid and detailed images of the Universe ever taken. Webb‘s powerful infrared imagers, spectrometers, and coronographs will allow for even more in the near future, including everything from surveys of the early Universe to direct imaging studies of exoplanets. Moreover, several next-generation telescopes will become operational in the coming years with 30-meter (~98.5 feet) primary mirrors, adaptive optics, spectrometers, and coronographs.

Before going to the Moon, the Apollo astronauts trained at various sites on Earth that best approximated the lunar surface, such as the volcanic regions Iceland, Hawaii and the US Southwest.  To help prepare for upcoming robotic and human Artemis missions, a newly upgraded “mini-Moon” lunar testbed will allow astronauts and robots to test out realistic conditions on the Moon including rough terrain and unusual sunlight.

Astronomers have not yet been able to map large portions of the radio emissions from our universe because of interference from the Earth itself. A team of astronomers hopes to change that, beginning with the LuSEE Night mission to the far side of the Moon. It will launch in 2025 and chart a new pathway to Lunar observatories.

Like Gravitational Waves (GWs) and Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs), Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are one of the most powerful and mysterious astronomical phenomena today. These transient events consist of bursts that put out more energy in a millisecond than the Sun does in three days. While most bursts last mere milliseconds, there have been rare cases where FRBs were found repeating. While astronomers are still unsure what causes them and opinions vary, dedicated observatories and international collaborations have dramatically increased the number of events available for study.

Astronomers have recently discovered that giant clouds of molecular hydrogen, the birthplace of stars, can live for tens of millions of years despite the facts that individual molecules are constantly getting destroyed and reassembled. This new research helps place a crucial piece of understanding in our overall picture of how stars are born.

Starship completes its wet-dress rehearsal, another problem for Webb, a nuclear rocket test is coming, and more cool NIAC grants.

Using data from the Solar Dynamics Observatory, scientists have discovered new clues that could help predict when and where the next solar flare might blast from the Sun.

In a recent paper submitted in November 2022, a scientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne quantifies how the Earth has not heard a radio signal from an extraterrestrial technological civilization over the course of approximately the last 60 years, which is when the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) began listening for such signals. They also quantify the potential likelihood pertaining to when we might hear a signal, along with recommending potential strategies that could aid in the ongoing search for detecting a signal from an extraterrestrial technological civilization.

In a recent study published in Sciences Advances, an international team of scientists led by the Technical University of Munich examined the Martian meteorite Tissint, which fell near the village of Tissint, Morocco, on July 18, 2011, with pieces of the meteorite found as far as approximately 50 kilometers (30 miles) from the village. What makes Tissint intriguing is the presence of a “huge organic diversity”, as noted in the study, which could help scientists better understand if life ever existed on Mars, and even the geologic history of Earth, as well.

Here’s another striking image from the venerable Hubble Space Telescope. These billows of blue and red show a detailed look at a small portion of the famous Orion Nebula. But what really catches the eye are the brilliant stars with the cross-shaped diffraction spikes — a hallmark of Hubble images.

Detecting exoplanets was frontier science not long ago. But now we’ve found over 5,000 of them, and we expect to find them around almost every star. The next step is to characterize these planets more fully in hopes of finding ones that might support life. Directly imaging them will be part of that effort.

The coming decades of space exploration will see astronauts return to the Moon, the first crewed missions to Mars, and robotic missions to the outer Solar System (among other things). These missions will leverage innovative technologies that allow faster transits, long-duration stays, and sustainable living far from Earth. To this end, NASA and other space agencies are investigating nuclear applications, especially where energy and propulsion are concerned. Many of these proposals have been on the books since the early space age and have been thoroughly validated.

Now that the Perseverance rover has dropped off ten regolith and rock sample tubes for a future sample return mission to retrieve, the plans for such a mission are coming together. The mission is a joint venture between NASA and the European Space Agency, and ESA has agreed to build a 2.5-meter-long robotic arm to pick up tubes and then transfer them to a rocket for the first-ever Mars samples to be brought to Earth.

On January 26, a truck-sized asteroid flew past Earth, coming extremely close – within 3,600 km (2,200 miles) above the planet’s surface. This is well within the orbit of geosynchronous satellites and NASA says this flyby is one of the closest approaches by a near-Earth object ever recorded.

The JWST is having a problem. One of its instruments, the Near Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS,) has gone offline. The NIRISS performs spectroscopy on exoplanet atmospheres, among other things.

In October 2021, NASA launched its ambitious Lucy mission. Its targets are asteroids, two in the main belt and eight Jupiter trojans, which orbit the Sun in the same path as Jupiter. The mission is named after early hominin fossils (Australopithecus afarensis,) and the name pays homage to the idea that asteroids are fossils from the Solar System’s early days of planet formation.

Staring off into the ancient past with a $10 billion space telescope, hoping to find extraordinarily faint signals from the earliest galaxies, might seem like a forlorn task. But it’s only forlorn if we don’t find any. Now that the James Webb Space Telescope has found those signals, the exercise has moved from forlorn to hopeful.

One of the main jobs for the Perseverance Mars rover past few weeks has been collecting carefully selected samples of Mars rock and soil. These samples have been placed and sealed in special sample tubes and left in well-identified places so that a future sample return mission can collect them and bring the Martian samples back to Earth.

Facial pareidolia is the human tendency or illusion of seeing facial structures in an everyday objects – such as seeing the “man in the Moon,” or the face of Jesus on a piece of toast. But here’s a newly found crater on Mars that might be a case of ‘bear-adoilia.’

Humanity is in a back-and-forth relationship with nature. First, we thought we were at the center of everything, with the Sun and the entire cosmos rotating around our little planet. We eventually realized that wasn’t true. Over the centuries, we’ve found that though Earth and life might be rare, our Sun is pretty normal, our Solar System is relatively non-descript, and even our galaxy is one of the billions of spiral galaxies, a type that makes up 60% of the galaxies in the Universe.

In 2033, NASA and China plan to send the first crewed missions to Mars. These missions will launch every two years when Earth and Mars are at the closest points in their orbits (Mars Opposition). It will take these missions six to nine months to reach the Red Planet using conventional technology. This means that astronauts could spend up to a year and a half in microgravity, followed by months of surface operations in Martian gravity (roughly 40% of Earth gravity). This could have drastic consequences for astronaut health, including muscle atrophy, bone density loss, and psychological effects.