Space News & Blog Articles

Technological revolutions can bring about dramatic changes in various fields, some of which are only tangentially related to the field being disrupted. Occasionally, a few technological revolutions happen simultaneously, enabling concepts that would have been impossible without any of them. Such revolutions are currently happening in the space industry. With rockets more massive than ever coming online, and mega-constellations of satellites roaming our skies, there is plenty of disruption going on. Now a team from MIT hopes to use those technologies to look at an area of astronomy that has never been seen before – low-frequency radio astronomy.

The average temperature of the universe is downright cold – right around 3 degrees above absolute zero.

To date, 5,250 extrasolar planets have been confirmed in 3,921 systems, with another 9,208 candidates awaiting confirmation. Of these, 195 planets have been identified as “terrestrial” (or “Earth-like“), meaning that they are similar in size, mass, and composition to Earth. Interestingly, many of these planets have been found orbiting within the circumsolar habitable zones (aka. “Goldilocks zone”) of M-type red dwarf stars. Examples include the closest exoplanet to the Solar System (Proxima b) and the seven-planet system of TRAPPIST-1.

Stars are born in molecular clouds, massive clouds of hydrogen that can contain millions of stellar masses of material. But how do molecular clouds form? There are different theories and models of that process, but the cloud formation is difficult to observe.

The planet Mars is arguably the most extensively studied planetary body in the entire Solar System, which began with telescopic observations by Galileo Galilei in 1609, with such telescopic observations later being taken to the extreme by Percival Lowell in the late 19th century when he reported seeing what he believed were artificial canals made by an advanced intelligent race of Martians. But it wasn’t until the first close up image of Mars taken by NASA’s Mariner 4 in 1965 that we saw the Red Planet for what it really was: a cold and dead world with no water and no signs of life, whatsoever.

We’re lucky to have a neighbour like Venus, even though it’s totally inhospitable, wildly different from the other rocky planets, and difficult to study. Its thick atmosphere obscures its surface, and only powerful radar can penetrate it. Its extreme atmospheric pressure and high temperatures are barriers to landers or rovers.

While Earth and Venus are approximately the same size and both lose heat at about the same rate, the internal mechanisms that drive Earth’s geologic processes differ from its neighbor. It is these Venusian geologic processes that a team of researchers led by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and the California Institute of Technology hope to learn more about as they discuss both the cooling mechanisms of Venus and the potential processes behind it.

Perseverance has been on Mars for two years. Are black holes the source of dark energy? Universe-breaking galaxies found. And an early warning system for asteroids.

The crew of the International Space Station can now breathe a little easier. An uncrewed replacement Soyuz docked safely to the station, meaning NASA astronaut Frank Rubio and Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin can make it back home to Earth.

As of this writing, almost 5300 exoplanets spanning approximately 4000 planetary systems have been confirmed to exist in our universe. With each new exoplanet discovery, scientists continue to learn more about planetary formation and evolution that has already shaken our understanding of this process down to its very core. One such example is “Hot Jupiters”, which are Jupiter-sized exoplanets, or larger, that orbit closer to their parents stars than Mercury does to our own. This is in stark contrast to our own Solar System, which has rocky planets closer towards our Sun and the gas giant planets much farther out.

To date, astronomers have confirmed 5,272 exoplanets in 3,943 systems using a variety of detection methods. Of these, 1,834 are Neptune-like, 1,636 are gas giants (Jupiter-sized or larger), 1,602 are rocky planets several times the size and mass of Earth (Super-Earths), and 195 have been Earth-like. With so many exoplanets available for study (and next-generation instruments optimized for the task), the process is shifting from discovery to characterization. And discoveries, which are happening regularly, are providing teasers of what astronomers will likely see in the near future.

The hunt for habitable extrasolar planets continues! Thanks to dedicated missions like Kepler, TESS, and Hubble, the number of confirmed extrasolar planets has exploded in the past fifteen years (with 5,272 confirmed and counting!). At the same time, next-generation telescopes, spectrometers, and advanced imaging techniques are allowing astronomers to study exoplanet atmospheres more closely. In short, the field is shifting from the process of discovery to characterization, allowing astronomers to more tightly constraint habitability.

Jupiter’s second Galilean moon, Europa, is one of the most fascinating planetary objects in our Solar System with its massive subsurface ocean that’s hypothesized to contain almost three times the volume of water as the entire Earth, which opens the possibility for life to potentially exist on this small moon. But while Europa’s interior ocean could potentially be habitable for life, its unique surface features equally draw intrigue from scientists, specifically the large red streaks that crisscross its cracked surface.

About 50,000 years ago, a nickel-iron meteorite some 50 meters across plowed into the Pleistocene-era grasslands of what is now Northern Arizona. It was traveling fast—about 13 kilometers per second. In just a few seconds, an impact dug out a crater just over a kilometer wide and spread rocks from the site for miles around.

An astronaut’s gotta eat, right? Especially if they are on a long-duration mission to places like the Moon. Scientists have been looking into how the lunar regolith could possibly support growing food for humans, as growing plants for food and oxygen will be critical for future long-term lunar missions.

The early Universe was swimming with dwarf galaxies only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. They merged with each other over time, building larger and more massive galaxies. At the same time, the giant black holes inside these dwarfs merged, too.

On Mars, NASA’s Perseverance rover is busy collecting rock samples that will be retrieved and brought back to Earth by the Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission. This will be the first sample-return mission from Mars, allowing scientists to analyze Martian rocks directly using instruments and equipment too large and cumbersome to send to Mars. To this end, scientists want to ensure that Perseverance collects samples that satisfy two major science goals – searching for signs of life (“biosignatures”) and geologic dating.

In the first data taken last summer with the Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) on the new James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers found six galaxies from a time when the Universe was only 3% of its current age, just 500-700 million years after the Big Bang. While its incredible JWST saw these galaxies from so long ago, the data also pose a mystery.

The Milky Way Galaxy contains an estimated one hundred billion stars. Between these lies the Interstellar Medium (ISM), a region permeated by gas and dust grains. This dust is largely composed of heavier elements, including silicate minerals, ice, carbon, and iron compounds. This dust plays a key role in the evolution of galaxies, facilitating the gravitational collapse of gas clouds to form new stars. This galactic dust is measurable by how it attenuates starlight from distant galaxies, causing it to shift from ultraviolet to far-infrared radiation.

Dust storms are a serious hazard on Mars. While smaller storms and dust devils happen regularly, larger ones happen every year (during summer in the southern hemisphere) and can cover continent-sized areas for weeks. Once every three Martian years (about five and a half Earth years), the storms can become large enough to encompass the entire planet and last up to two months. These storms play a major role in the dynamic processes that shape the surface of Mars and are sometimes visible from Earth (like the 2018 storm that ended the Opportunity rover’s mission).

Sending a lander to Venus presents several huge engineering problems. Granted, we’d get a break from the nail-biting entry, descent and landing, since Venus’ atmosphere is so thick, a lander would settle gently to the surface like a stone settles in water — no sky cranes or retrorockets required.