Space News & Blog Articles

The cosmic zoo has strange beasts that astronomers stumble across in the most fascinating ways. Not long ago a team in Australia found a highly unusual magnetar, one of the weirder denizens of the starry zoo. It’s called GPM J1839-10 and it lies some 15,000 light-years away in the direction of the constellation Scutum.

Impact craters are nature’s signature from a more chaotic time in our Solar System’s history. A quick glance at the Moon’s disfigured surface makes that clear. Same with Mars, though a telescope is needed to examine it. Or better yet, an orbital spacecraft with a powerful camera.

China’s next-generation crew capsule was given an updated timeline this week. According to Yang Liwei, deputy chief designer of China’s Human Spaceflight Program, the new capsule will make its first flight in 2027 or 2028.  Meeting this timeline will be a key milestone in China’s recently announced plan to land on the Moon by 2030.

Sunlike stars and those smaller than the Sun end their lives as white dwarfs. Without a continued source of energy from hydrogen fusion, these stars eventually collapse under their own weight. They would continue collapsing were it not for the pressure of electrons. As long as the remaining mass of a star is less than about 1.4 Suns, the electron pressure and gravitational pull will balance each other, creating a white dwarf.

The more astronomers look at the early Universe, the more discoveries they make. Some of those finds change what they thought they knew about the infancy of the cosmos. For example, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) recently found evidence of carbon-based molecules and dust existing only a billion years after the Big Bang. It looks a bit different from the dust observed later in the Universe.

The ancient Universe is weird and secretive. Scientists have made laudable progress in uncovering more and more information on how the Universe began and what conditions were like all those billions of years ago. Powerful infrared telescopes, especially the ground-breaking James Webb Space Telescope, have let astronomers study the ancient light from the early Universe and remove some of the secrecy.

Thanks to the laws of physics, there are two basic rules about telescopes. The first is that the bigger your primary lens or mirror, the higher the resolution of your telescope. The second is that lenses and mirrors have to be curved to focus light into an image. So, if you want a space telescope sensitive enough to see the atmospheres of distant exoplanets, Your telescope is going to need a large curved mirror or lens. But neither of these things is technically true, as a newly proposed telescope design demonstrates.

When the DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) spacecraft intentionally slammed into asteroid moonlet Dimorphos on September 26, 2022, telescopes around the world and those in space watched as it happened, and continued to monitor the aftermath.

Sending astronauts to the moon is OK — but more Americans think NASA should instead put a high priority on monitoring outer space for asteroids and other objects that could pose a threat to Earth, according to the Pew Research Center’s latest survey focusing on Americans’ perspectives on space policy.

Space-based solar power (SBSP) is considered one of the most promising technologies for addressing Climate Change. The concept calls for satellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) to collect power without interruption and beam it to receiving stations on Earth. This technology circumvents the main limiting factor of solar energy, which is how it is subject to the planet’s diurnal cycle and weather. While the prospect of SBSP has been considered promising for decades, it’s only in recent years that it has become practical, thanks to the declining costs of sending payloads to space.

It seems like every week, researchers are finding more and more interesting exoplanets. Many of them have analogs in our own solar system – hot Jupiter or Super Earth are commonly used as descriptions. However, there is a feature of a solar system that doesn’t exist in our solar system but might somewhere out in the galaxy – a Trojan planet. Now researchers from the Centro de Astrobiologia in Madrid and colleagues in the UK, EU, and US have found what they believe to be the first possible evidence of a Trojan planet.

In radio astronomy, there are lots of natural radio signals to observe. The glow of hydrogen gas, the swirl of electrons along a magnetic field, or the pop-pop-pop of pulsars. These signals usually have a very natural character to them, so astronomers can distinguish them from the artificial chirps and chatters of terrestrial sources. But when you’re looking for the signals of alien civilizations, things can get more tricky. They should have an artificial character similar to the radio signals of humans. So how can astronomers distinguish between the distant artificial signal and the local ones?

Until recently, astronomers could not observe the first stars and galaxies that formed in the Universe. This occurred during what is known as the “Cosmic Dark Ages,” a period that took place between 380,000 and 1 billion years after the Big Bang. Thanks to next-generation instruments like the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), improved methods and software, and updates to existing observatories, astronomers are finally piercing the veil of this era and getting a look at how the Universe as we know it began.

One of the most commonly discussed challenges when starting our species’ space exploration journey is how to get the resources necessary for life off of the Earth. Typically this is thought of as two things – water and oxygen, but, luckily, oxygen can be supplied by splitting apart a water molecule, so the most critical resource we could find in space is water. Commonly called a “volatile” in the language of space resources, water has been the focal point of many plans for in-situ resource utilization on the Moon, Mars, and elsewhere. Some of those plans have been well thought out, others not. One particular showed some promise when it was selected as part of NASA’s Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) funding back in 2019, and here we’ll take a closer look at it.

The Gemini South telescope has captured a new image of the glowing nebula IC 2220. Nicknamed the Toby Jug Nebula, this object got its name because it looks like an old English jug. But no fun drinking games are happening here.

As of 2019, China began conducting preliminary studies for a crewed lunar mission that would take place by the 2030s. Two years later, the China National Space Agency (CNSA) and Roscosmos announced a partnership to create an International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) around the South Pole-Aitken Basin. The proposed timeline for development came down to three phases: Reconnaissance (2021-25), Construction (2025-35), and Utilization (2035-onward). Earlier this year, China announced that its space agency would send the first crewed mission to the lunar surface by 2030.

Nuclear fusion is what separates stars from planets. Stars are massive enough to fuse hydrogen in their cores, while planets are not. But in between these two categories are brown dwarfs, which are massive enough to experience some nuclear fusion, just not hydrogen. The largest of them are hot and star-like. The smallest of them are barely warm enough to bake a pizza.

NASA recently selected a new science payload that will travel to the Moon through a series of robotic missions via the agency’s Artemis program. This instrument suite, known as the Dating an Irregular Mare Patch with a Lunar Explorer (DIMPLE), will have the task of studying the Ina Irregular Mare Patch, also known as Ina, which is a small depression that could provide insights into the Moon’s volcanic history. It was discovered using orbital images from the Apollo 15 crew, and despite several past studies, its origin remains unclear.

The search for life on Mars has been a long a confusing one. Inconclusive experiments abound, but one thing is certain – there is definitely organic material on the Red Planet. Now, a new study in Nature has confirmed that finding and showed just how complex that organic material actually is.

Satellites often offer new perspectives when they launch. Sometimes because of the location they are placed in – sometimes because of their instrumentation. A new satellite by a consortium of European companies and agencies now provides a new perspective on one of the most powerful and fleeting natural phenomena – lightning.

On July 14, 2023, at 2:35 pm Indian Standard Time (5:05 am EST), the Indian Space Resource Organisation (ISRO) successfully launched their Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft from the Satish Dhawan Space Center, which is the primary spaceport of the ISRO. The goal of the mission is to put India’s first lander (Vikram) and rover (Pragyan) on the lunar surface and is scheduled to touch down on the Moon on August 23, 2023. This mission comes after the ISRO’s Chandrayaan-2 Vikram lander crashed on the Moon on September 6, 2019, due to a last-minute guidance software glitch. While the ISRO indicated everything was going according to plan, they unexpectedly lost contact with the Vikram lander approximately 2.1 kilometers (1.3 miles) above the lunar surface.