Space News & Blog Articles

Blue Origin has been busy lately.  They launched their founder, Jeff Bezos, into space and put a bid in on NASA’s new Lunar Lander project.  While SpaceX won that contract back in April, Blue Origin has continued to fight for their right to supply the space agency with an alternative lander.  And recently, their not-quite-an-astronaut chief had added another fuel to the fire by offering to take $2 billion off the price tag of a Blue Origin lander.

Being the richest person in the world certainly helps when offering discounts to the federal government.  But Blue Origin’s frustration with NASA’s tender process goes far beyond money.  Typically the agency would have selected two companies to supply a lander, in order to ensure there would be a backup in case one project failed, and also to encourage competition between the two competing entities.

In fact, there were three companies originally selected as part of an assessment program – SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Dynetics, another aerospace contractor.  NASA has not justified publicly why it only selected SpaceX to continue the development of the lander, causing outrage from both Dynetics and Blue Origin.

Bezos attempted to ameliorate one potential reason for not supporting multiple contractors in an open letter to NASA.  According to the letter “[Blue Origin] stand[s] ready to help NASA moderate its technical risks and solve its budgetary constraints and put the Artemis Program back on a more competitive, credible, and sustainable path.”

What is not clear so far is whether or not this open letter will have any impact at all on NASA’s final decision.  Maybe the recent proof that the company is able to get to almost-space would increase confidence in its ability to complete Artemis’ mission objective.  Or maybe it will feel it has almost nothing to lose by supporting a company that is will to offer a “permanent waiver” of a large chunk of the development cost of the project. Or maybe it will be forced to pressure from the Senate, which recently passed a $10 billion spending bill for the Artemis human lander system.  

On October 19th, 2017, astronomers made the first-ever detection of an interstellar object (ISO) in our Solar System. This body, named 1I/2017 U1 (‘Oumuamua), was spotted shortly after it flew by Earth on its way to the outer Solar System. Years later, astronomers are still hypothesizing what this object could have been (an interstellar “dust bunny,” hydrogen iceberg, nitrogen icebergs), with Harvard Prof. Abraham Loeb going as far as to suggest that it might have been an extraterrestrial solar sail.

Roughly three years later, interest in extraterrestrial visitors has not subsided, in part because of the release of the Pentagon report on the existence of “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.” This prompted Loeb and several of his fellow scientists to form the Galileo Project, a multi-national, multi-institutional research team dedicated to bringing the search for Extraterrestrial Technological Civilizations (ETC) into the mainstream.

On Monday, July 26th, the Project was officially announced via a live stream presentation that kicked off at 12:00 PM EST (09:00 AM PST). The event was hosted by Michael Wall, a senior writer at Space.com and the author of “Out There” (2018), which deals with humanity’s ongoing search for alien life. Co-hosting the event and leading its Q&A session was Faye Flam, a journalist and science writer with Science Magazine.

Throughout the conference, Loeb and Project co-founder Dr. Frank Laukien explained the purpose and inspiration behind this new project. Consistent with the approach of Galileo Galilee, Loeb and Laukien state that their Project will conduct a scientific and “agnostic” search for indications of ETCs by (as they describe it) “Daring to Look Through New Telescopes” (more on that below).

A Brave Theory

In addition to being the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University, Loeb is also the Director of Harvard’s Institute for Theory and Computation (ITC), the Founding Director of the Black Hole Initiative (BHI), and the Chair of the Breakthrough Starshot Advisory Committee. In 2018, he and postdoctoral researcher Dr. Shmuel Bialy released a study titled “Could Solar Radiation Pressure Explain ‘Oumuamua’s Peculiar Acceleration?“ which detailed their controversial theory.

One of the less appreciated aspects of George Lucas’ vision for Star Wars was that he predicted the existence of planets in binary star systems years before we saw even the first exoplanet.  Now a team from the University of Cambridge and the Max Planck Institute for Extra-terrestrial Physics have found how exactly those planets can form without being torn apart by their accompanying suns.

At this point, astronomers have found plenty of planets like Tatooine, orbiting around a binary star system. Kepler found around a dozen that orbit both stars in a binary, in addition to dozens of others that orbit at least one star in a binary system.  But how exactly such worlds could form remained a mystery until recently.

To solve that mystery, Dr. Roman Rafikov of Cambridge and Dr. Kedron Silsbee of Max Planck turned to computational physics models.  Gravity in binary star systems can wreak havoc on planetary formation models, with the gravitational pull of one star destroying a protoplanet before it is able to amalgamate enough mass to truly be considered a planet.  That same gravity can also disrupt the protoplanetary disks that planets can form out of.

But Drs. Rafikov and Silsbee found a very special set of conditions that still allows planets to form in such a harsh environment.  In order to unlock the secret they studied the nearest binary star system – Alpha Centauri.

In our nearest stellar neighbor, the smaller star orbits around the larger one about once every 100 years.  It’s a relatively stable gravitational dance, essentially what would happen if you replaced Uranus with a star and kept it on the same orbit.  In such an environment there are two important variables needed for the formation of a planet.

An opportunity in 2019 lays the groundwork for balloon-borne detectors on Venus, working to unravel a key mystery.

The skies of Venus may become a busy place in the coming decade, using technology field-tested here on Earth.

A team out of NASA JPL-Caltech hypothesized that terrestrial earthquakes should also produce low-frequency infrasonic sound waves, which would be transmitted from the ground through the atmosphere as changes in barometric pressure. These sound waves, while difficult to detect, should be measurable via highly sensitive barometers carried aloft.

The team had a chance to put this idea to the test in 2019. In early July, a series of powerful earthquakes rattled the town of Ridgecrest, California. This was followed by over 10,000 aftershocks over the following six-week period. This gave the team the chance to fly instruments aboard four heliotrope balloons, rising to about 18 to 24 kilometers altitude with the warmth of the daytime Sun, and settling back to Earth at night.

Previous experiments detected deliberate human-made earthquakes caused by seismic hammers or explosives, but parsing out faint low frequency waves is magnitudes more difficult. Environmental noise—to include vibrations from the balloons themselves—all had to be accounted for.

Ganymede has been getting alot of attention lately.  It was the co-star of a video from Juno recently, and now scientists found something to make it an even more intriguing place visit – water vapor.

It has been well known for years that Ganymede harbors water, and lots of it.  In fact, the ninth biggest object in our solar system might hold more water than all of the Earth’s oceans combined.  However, scientists previously thought that most of it had been either frozen on the moon’s surface or was potentially trapped as a liquid under massive ice sheets.

Updated image of Ganymede taken by Juno in June 2021.
Credit – NASA / JPL – Caltech / SwRI / MSSS

Most observations up to this point had confirmed that theory.  But there was one that was a little bit off – two separate ultraviolet images that Hubble took of Ganymede back in 1998. Those, which can be seen as two different “colors” of ultraviolet light, gave scientists several insights.  First, Ganymede had a magnetic field, which is similar to Earth’s in that there are auroral ovals around the moon’s poles.  Second, there are molecules of O2 surrounding the planet, which accounted for other similarities between the two ultraviolet images.  That also made sense, given that O2 can be stripped off the surface when a charged particle interacts with the ice there.

But there were some clear differences between the two images as well.  Originally, scientists ascribed these differences to the presence of molecular oxygen in the atmosphere as well.  Its absorption band could have accounted for the difference in reflection at the ultraviolet wavelengths Hubble used.

The robotic arms of the ISS are some of its most useful tools.  The arms, designed by Canadian and Japanese space agencies, have been instrumental in ferrying around astronauts and shepherding modules to one side of the ISS.  However, the Russian segment lacked its own robotic arm – until a new one designed by ESA was launched last week.

The European Robotic Arm (ERA) will arrive at the ISS on July 29th along with Nauka, the Laboratory Module it is attached to the outside of.  With the help of 5 expected space walks, the arm will soon be commissioned and will start on its first tasks – getting Nauka’s airlock up and running so it can become a permanent part of the station, and installing a large radiator to help handle the increased cooling load of the station.

As part of those projects, ERA will get to show off its skills.  Those include acting like an inchworm, moving hand over hand around the Nauka module.  In addition, it is the first arm to be controllable from either inside or outside the station, and that control will allow astronauts and cosmonauts to move up to 8000 kg within 5mm of a desired location.  

In fact, that level of accuracy doesn’t even need to be manually controlled – the ERA is autonomous and can run strictly off written step-by-step commands.  Its seven degrees of freedom and 9.7 meter reach allow it to access even outside its home module.  Made of carbon fiber and aluminum, it is also strong enough to handle the wear and tear of space, and hopefully the impacts of debris that have affected other arms.

Such impressive specifications took a lot of effort – 14 years of development from 22 companies spread over seven European countries.  But it is part of a larger push to translate the ISS into a more commercially friendly space, with additional research bays, upgraded data links, and external research platforms.  

On Feb. 18th, 2021, NASA’s Perseverance rover landed within the Jezero Crater on Mars. Like its predecessor, Curiosity, a fellow member of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program (MEP), the goal of Perseverance is to seek out evidence of possible life on Mars (past and present). A key part of this mission will be the first sample return ever performed on Mars, where samples obtained by Perseverance will be placed in a cache for later retrieval and return to Earth.

For the past five months, mission controllers at NASA have been driving the rover further from where it landed (Octavia E. Butler Landing Site) and conducting test flights with the Ingenuity helicopter. NASA is now in the midst of making final preparations for Perseverance to collect its first sample of Martian rock. This historic first is expected to begin by the end of the month or by early August and will culminate with the return of the samples to Earth by 2031.

This rock will come from an area known as the “Cratered Floor Fractured Rough,” a 4 km2 (1.5-square-mile) patch of crater floor that may contain Jezero’s deepest and most ancient layers of exposed bedrock. These rocks will also be the most significant sample return since the Apollo astronauts brought rocks back from the Moon. These samples are still teaching us things about the formation of the Earth-Moon System and the evolution of the Solar System.

Said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for science at NASA Headquarters, in a recent NASA press release:

“When Neil Armstrong took the first sample from the Sea of Tranquility 52 years ago, he began a process that would rewrite what humanity knew about the Moon. I have every expectation that Perseverance’s first sample from Jezero Crater, and those that come after, will do the same for Mars. We are on the threshold of a new era of planetary science and discovery.”

The Earth’s magnetic field is an underappreciated wonder of the natural world.  It protects our atmosphere, provides some of the most breathtaking scenery when it creates auroras, and allows people to navigate from one side of the world to the other.  Unfortunately, it won’t be able to save us from the death of the Sun though.  At least that’s the finding of some new research by Dr. Dimitri Veras of the University of Warwick and Dr. Aline Vidotto of Trinity College Dublin.

The Sun’s expected life cycle is pretty well mapped out by scientists. After it’s current main sequence phase is over, it will run out of the hydrogen fuel source that powers the nuclear fusion in its core.  Without the pushing force of the fusion, the Sun itself will contract and then heat up.  That additional heat will push its outer atmosphere to many multiples of its size today, potentially even swallowing up Earth, but definitely consuming Venus and Mercury.  

During its red giant phase, the sun will also create a powerful, fluctuating solar wind.  Usually our magnetic field is able to stop the particles of the solar wind from stripping away Earth’s atmosphere.  However, with the increased amount of particles caused by the red giant constantly bombarding it, the magnetic field has little chance of protecting its atmosphere.  As it is stripped away, the probability of life surviving on the planet slowly diminishes, despite the fact that the Earth will likely be pulling farther away from the Sun due to the decrease in gravity associated with the star’s lower mass.

The habitable zone around red giants is much farther out than main sequence yellow stars – putting it out past the orbit of Neptune.  The slow orbital path Earth will be taking won’t get us there in time before all life on the planet’s surface is cooked.  So we can be sure that a dying sun would likely be able to kill us in more than one way.

After its red giant phase, though, a white dwarf emerges, which is much more stable and doesn’t emit any solar wind at all.  But in order for life to survive to this point, its planet’s magnetic sphere has to be approximately 100 times the strength of Jupiter’s, and it has to be able to move quickly between the habitable zones of three different star types.

As of July 23, 2021, China’s Mars rover Zhurong has traveled 585 meters across the surface of Mars. And along the way, it’s taking pictures of interesting sights.

Some of the most intriguing recent images from the rover show debris from the rover’s landing. During its drives, the rover came upon the parachute and backshell. The China National Space Administration says as the rover drove south of its landing site, it first “saw” the debris on the horizon with its front obstacle avoidance camera, and then took a closer image (lead image) with its navigation terrain camera.

CNSA said the rover was about 30 meters away from the parachute and backshell assembly in this image, and about 350 meters away from the landing site.

July 23 marked the first anniversary of the launch of the Tianwen-1 and Zhurong rover mission. The lander carrying the rover touched down on Mars on May 15 of this year, landing in the southern part of Utopia Planitia, a vast plain in the northern hemisphere of Mars.

Here are more images from Zhurong:

Gravitational-wave astronomy is set to revolutionize our understanding of the cosmos. In only a few years it has significantly enhanced our understanding of black holes, but it is still a scientific field in its youth. That means there are still serious limitations to what can be observed.

Currently, all gravitational observatories are based on Earth. This makes the detectors easier to build and maintain, but it also means the observatories are plagued by background noise. Observatories such as LIGO and Virgo work by measuring the distance shift between mirrors as a gravitational wave passes through the observatory. This shift is extremely small. For mirrors placed 4 kilometers apart, the shift is a mere fraction of the width of a proton. The vibrations of a truck driving down a nearby road will shift the mirrors much more than that. So LIGO and Virgo use statistics and models of black hole mergers to distinguish a true signal from a false one.

Because of terrestrial background noise, current observatories focus on the high-frequency gravitational waves (10 – 1000 Hz) generated by black hole mergers. There has been discussion of building a space-based gravitational-wave observatory, such as LISA, which would observe low-frequency gravitational waves, such as those generated by early cosmic inflation. But many gravitational waves are in the intermediate range. To detect these, a recent study proposes building a gravitational-wave observatory on the Moon.

The Moon has long been a coveted location for astronomers. Optical telescopes on the Moon wouldn’t suffer from atmospheric blurring, and unlike space-based telescopes such as Hubble and Webb, they wouldn’t be limited by the size of your launch rocket. Most of the ideas proposed have been very hypothetical, but as we look towards a human return to the Moon in the next decade they are becoming less so. Already NASA is studying the construction of a radio telescope on the far lunar surface. Building a lunar gravitational-wave observatory would be significantly more challenging, but not impossible.

This recent study proposes a Gravitational-wave Lunar Observatory for Cosmology (GLOC). Rather than worrying about how such an observatory would be constructed, the study instead focuses on the sensitivity and observational limits of such an observatory. As you might expect, a lunar observatory wouldn’t suffer from the background vibrations that trouble Earth observatories. As a result, it could have a baseline four times longer than LIGO. This would give it a range on gravitational wave frequencies as low as a tenth of a Hertz. This would allow it to observe everything from stellar-mass binary mergers to those of intermediate-mass black holes.

Planetary formation is a complicated, multilayered process.  Even with the influx of data on exoplanets, there are still only two known planets that are not yet fully formed.  Known as PDS 70b and PDS 70c, the two planets, which were originally found by the Very Large Telescope, are some of the best objects we have to flesh out our planetary formation models. And now, one of them has been confirmed to have a moon-forming disk around it.

That additional insight came from observations conducted by ALMA.  Astronomers had long predicted that planet PDS 70c was surrounded by such a disk, but with the images they had captured previously they were unable to confirm its existence.  Now, it has been physically confirmed beyond the shadow of a doubt.

Moon formation is even less well understood than planetary formation at this point.  Even the origins of our own Moon are still up for debate.  But the PDS 70c discovery has the potential to illuminate the creation of at least one as we are watching.  In fact, there is enough material in the disk to create three moons the size of our own around the Jupiter-like planet.  

The moon formation process also plays a key part in planetary formation, with circumplanetary disks that can form moons also influencing the creation of the planet itself.  Watching that disk evolve will help scientists with their models of both moon and planetary formation.  

That evolution is sure to take millions of years, but so far PDS 70c is the only known planet with any type of circumplanetary disk.  The same data set confirming its existence showed that it’s Saturn-like twin, PDS 70b, does not have a disk that some scientists had previously suggested.  Others might be found with more powerful telescopes, but until then this system is the best we have.

Observing the dark side of planets is hard. In the visible spectrum, they are almost unobservable, while in the infrared some heat signatures may come through, but not enough to help see what is going on in a planet’s atmosphere.  Now a team from the University of Tokyo think they’ve developed a way to monitor weather patterns on the night side of one of the most difficult planets of all – Venus.

Venus is well known for its turbulent atmosphere and hellish temperatures.  But on the night side of the planet it is not clear what effect the cooling associated with being out of the sun has on the “weather” of the planet.  Venus’ weather itself can be thought of as the continual movement of clouds in the dense planetary atmosphere.  But on the night side, the resolution of infrared images that might be able to provide insight into that weather hasn’t been high enough to be useful.

So Professor Takeshi Imamura from the University of Tokyo turned to Venus Climate Orbiter Akatsuki.  It is the first ever Japanese probe to orbit another planet, and has been providing images of Venus’ atmosphere since shortly after its launch in 2010.  In that time, it has managed to collect some data on the night side of the planet, but trying to resolve small cloud patterns against the overall background of noise in the nighttime Venusian atmosphere proved difficult.  

Adding to that difficulty were fierce winds that whip the atmosphere around at speeds exceeding hurricane-force winds on Earth.  Known as a “super-rotation”, this phenomenon is specific to the atmosphere of Venus.  Forcing weather patterns rapidly from east to west, it makes tracking those weather patterns particularly difficult.  But not too difficult for graduate student Kiichi Fukuya.  He developed a methodology that allows researchers to account for the super-rotation in their data, and isolate small scale cloud movements that lie therein.

One dramatic outcome from the newfound ability to correct for the super-rotation is finding that the north-south winds that drive some of the atmosphere’s circulation switch direction on the night side of the planet.  The full consequences of such an abrupt change are sure to be huge, but Dr. Imamura and his team have not yet parsed them out.  

The International Space Station (ISS) is about to get a little bigger.

On July 21, the Russian Space Agency launched the station’s newest module into orbit aboard a Proton-M rocket. The module, dubbed Nauka (which means science), is the station’s first new module since 2016, aside from some new docking ports and airlocks. The Nauka module includes several important additions that will enhance the station’s capabilities.

One of Nauka’s primary systems is its guidance and navigation abilities, which will provide additional attitude control capabilities to the ISS. At 13 meters long, the module’s interior contains new research facilities and storage space. The module also provides additional sleeping quarters for station crew. This is an important addition, since the United States recently re-established its human spaceflight capabilities with two new spacecraft: SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule, and the upcoming Boeing Starliner, slated for another test flight later this year. The addition of both new vehicles alongside the Russian Soyuz vehicle means that bigger crews can visit the station at once, and Nauka will provide these larger crews with a home.

Nauka is also carrying one other new piece of technology: a robotic arm built by the European Space Agency. A counterpart to the Canadarm 2 already on station, the European arm is 11 meters long and is designed to ‘walk’ around the Russian segment of the ISS (which the Canadarm can’t reach), carrying out repairs and upgrades as necessary.

Nauka’s development was a troubled process, and it has gone through years of problems and delays. It was first built as a backup to the Zarya module – the first component of the ISS ever launched in 1998. Nauka was set to join its twin in orbit in 2007, but failed to launch then, and was delayed again several times for various reasons, including fuel leaks, expired warranties, and most recently, pandemic delays.

Solar sails have been receiving a lot of attention lately.  In part that is due to a series of high profile missions that have successfully proven the concept. It’s also in part due to the high profile Breakthrough Starshot project, which is designing a solar sail powered mission to reach Alpha Centauri. But this versatile third propulsion system isn’t only useful for far flung adventures – it has advantages closer to home as well.  A new paper by engineers at UCLA defines what those advantages are, and how we might be able to best utilize them.

The literal driving force behind some solar sail projects are lasers.  These concentrated beams of light are perfect to provide a pushing force against a solar sail.  However, they are also useful as weapons if scaled up too much, vaporizing anything in its path.  As such, one of the main design constraints for solar sail systems is around materials that can withstand a high power laser blast, yet still be light enough to not burden the craft it is attached to with extra weight.

For the missions that graduate student Ho-Ting Tung and Dr. Artur Davoyan of UCLA’s Mechanical Engineering Department envision that weight is miniscule.  They expect any sailing spacecraft to weigh less than 100 grams.  That 100 grams would include a sail array that measures up to 10 cm square.

With such small masses and large area comes the huge benefit of solar sailing – the maximum speed achievable by this propulsion technology is leaps and bounds faster than the two more traditional technologies – chemical and electrical propulsion.  The study focused on two types of orbital maneuvers normally performed by those other propulsion systems – one where the sail moved around in Earth’s orbit, and one where it traveled between planets.

Schematic showing how to use laser acceleration to reach the outer solar system much more quickly than conventional methods.
Credit – Tung & Davoyan

Launching satellites is an expensive business – at least for now.  But satellites are necessary in astronomy for one major reason – it gets telescopes above the atmosphere.  The Earth’s atmosphere and its associated weather patterns are a massive hindrance to collecting good images.  If a stray cloud passes in front of the observational target once over the course of a few days, it could ruin the entire image.  Which is why some of the most striking astronomical pictures come from space-based observatories like Hubble. But now, a team of researchers from Durham, Toronto, and Princeton Universities has come up with a new way to get above that atmosphere that doesn’t involve a launch into orbit. They want to use a balloon.

The project, called the Superpressure Balloon-born Imaging telescope (SuperBIT), uses a helium filled balloon the size of a football stadium to raise a .5m telescope to a 40km altitude.  At that height, the instrument is above 99.5% of the Earth’s atmosphere, and is capable of snapping incredible photos similar to those captured by Hubble.

The telescope technology itself is nothing special, but the ability to attach it to a balloon is.  In the past such a large balloon would lose pressure quickly, making any sustained observational mission a moot point.  However, NASA recently developed a “superpressure” balloon that is able to hold its helium for months, allowing the entire assembly to stay aloft for long enough to collect good, clear data on an observational target.

That data will be help by the stabilization array attached to the balloon platform.  In a previous test flight in 2019, the telescope only varied by less than 1/36000 of a degree over the course of an hour.  Extreme accuracy is necessary for long exposure times, and SuperBIT seems to pass that test.

Another advantage it has over telescope based systems is that it eventually will in fact come down.  Hubble has been using mostly the same imaging equipment for the last 30+ years, making its optics system a virtual dinosaur by modern day standards.  Just how difficult it is to repair a space-based telescope is clear from Hubble’s story.  With balloon based observational platforms, there will always be the ability to launch an upgraded version a few months after the last iteration was in the air.

Planet Earth is currently experiencing an unprecedented warming trend. Average global temperatures are rising at an accelerated rate in response to greenhouse gas emissions produced by human activity. These rising temperatures, in turn, result in the release of additional greenhouse gases (like methane), leading to positive feedback loops that threaten to compound the problem further.

This scientific consensus is based on multiple lines of evidence, all of which indicate the need for swift action. According to new research led by members of the NASA Sea Level Change Science Team (N-SLCT) at the University of Hawaii at Manao (UHM), a new Lunar cycle that will begin by the mid-2030s will amplify sea levels already rising due to climate change. This will mean even more coastal flooding during high tides and coastal storms in the near future.

The study that describes their findings, titled “Rapid increases and extreme months in projections of United States high-tide flooding,” was published last month in Nature Climate Change. The research was led by Phil Thompson, an assistant professor at UHM’s Joint Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research, and included members from UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the University of South Florida, NASA JPL, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Also known as “nuisance floods” (or sunny day floods), high tide floods (HTFs) are already a problem in many coastal cities around the world. These occur when tides reach anywhere from 0.5 to 0.6 m (1.75 to 2 ft) above the daily average for high tides, leading to flooded shorelines, streets, storm drains, and basements in coastal communities. According to reports by the NOAA, more than 600 of these floods occurred in 2019 alone.

Similar reports indicated that between May 2020 and April 2021, coastal communities in the US saw twice as many HTFs as they did in 2000. In addition, 14 locations along the Southeast Atlantic and Gulf coastlines tied or broke their records for the number of HTF days by a factor of 4 to 11 over what they experienced in 2000, and the number of HTF events is now accelerating at 80% of NOAA water level stations along the East and Gulf Coasts.

Space is full of hazards.  The Earth, and it’s atmosphere, does a great job of shielding us from most of them.  But sometimes those hazards are more powerful than even those protections can withstand, and potentially catastrophic events can result.  Some of the most commonly known potential catastrophic events are solar flares.  While normal solar activity can be deflected by the planet’s magnetic field, resulting in sometimes spectacular auroras, larger solar flares are a danger to look out for.  So it’s worth celebrating a team of researchers from the International Space Science Institute which found a way to better track these potentially dangerous natural events.

Extremely large coronal mass ejections (CMEs) are relatively rare, and when they do happen they normally aren’t pointed at Earth.  This was the case in 2012, when a massive solar flare missed Earth, but could have knocked out power grids and destroyed satellites on an entire hemisphere of the planet.

Flares as large as the one in 2012 are relatively easy to detect using conventional sensing methods, because of their size but also their positioning.    These sensors can watch for signs of brightening on the Sun’s surface that are indicative of a solar flare, or watch the flare itself as it passes out of the sun into the blackness of space.    Unfortunately the same sensing techniques are not able to detect the most important kind of CMEs – those that are aimed right for us but don’t cause any brightening.  

These CMEs, which don’t produce any telltale signs on the Sun’s surface, are known as “stealth” CMEs.  Usually we only notice these when they actually hit the Earth, and don’t have a good indication of where they formed on the Sun.  However, the researchers used data collected on four stealth CMEs by NASA’s STEREO spacecraft that did in fact track them back to their origins on the Sun.  

When they subsequently analyzed those origin points with other data collected simultaneously, they noticed a changing brightening pattern that appeared for all four stealth CMEs.  They believe these changes are indicative of the stealth CME’s formation, allowing scientists precious time to detect and prepare for a potential massive CME hit once similar patterns are detected.

In the coming decade, NASA and the ESA will be sending two dedicated missions that will explore Jupiter’s moon Europa. These missions are known as the Europa Clipper and the JUpiter ICy moons Explorer (JUICE) missions, which will fulfill a dream that has been decades in the making – searching for possible evidence of life inside Europa. Since the 1970s, astronomers have theorized that this satellite contains a warm-water ocean that could support life.

The case for life in Europa has only been bolstered thanks to multiple flybys and observation campaigns that have been mounted since. According to new research led by the University of Hawaii at Manoa, the best way to look for potential signs of life (aka. biosignatures) would be to analyze small impact craters on Europa’s surface. These patches of exposed subsurface ice could point the way towards life that might exist deeper in the moon’s interior.

Speculation about the possible existence of an interior ocean in Europa began in 1979 after the Voyager 1 and 2 missions flew past Jupiter and its moons on their way to the outer Solar System. With data obtained by the Galileo and New Horizons spacecraft and the Hubble Space Telescope have provided additional indications, which included how it interacted with Jupiter’s magnetic field, tidal models, surface features, and plume activity.

Between resurfacing events and surface plumes that originate from the interior, scientists have speculated that biosignatures – chemicals produced by living organisms – that are the result of life in Europa’s interior ocean may have made it to the surface as well. However, since Europa orbits within Jupiter’s powerful magnetic field, its surface is subject to intense amounts of radiation that would destroy any traces of biological material.

This means that any biomolecules that are periodically ejected by plume activity or resurfacing events would only be likely to survive beneath the surface. Luckily, Europa’s surface is covered with small impacts that have taken place over the course of millions of years, which measure about 30 cm (12 inches) deep. These impacts would have also resulted in what is known as “impact gardening,” where impacts cause material from above and below the surface to be mixed.

The universe has some very extreme places in it – and there are few places more extreme than the surface of a neutron star.  These ultradense objects form after a supergiant star collapses into a sphere about 10 kilometers (6 miles) in diameter.  Their surface is extreme because of the gravity, which is about a billion times stronger than Earth. However, that gravity also forces the stellar remnant to be extraordinarily flat.  Just how flat is the outcome of a new set of theoretical research by PhD student Fabian Gittins from the University of Southampton. 

Previous estimates of the height of these “mountains” on the surfaces of neutron stars thought they might be able to grow up to a few centimeters. A combination of factors went into these estimates, including gravitational forces pulling any slight bump flat to the surface, as well as a pushing force from ultra-dense matter that might be capable of supporting the mountains themselves.

What the researchers found was that the forces at work on the surface were almost sure to limit the height of any such mountain to only a few fractions of a millimeter, decreasing the height of previous estimates by a factor of more than 100.  It shows how close to a perfect sphere neutron stars really are.

Even those small imperfections on the surface of a neutron star can have large impacts on the wider universe.  Some neutron stars spin, with the fastest (PSR J1748-2446ad) rotating at 716 times a second.  With such high spin rates combined with such dense gravities, the small imperfections in the sphere represented by the “mountains” in the study should potentially result in gravitational waves.

So far scientists have been unable to find any gravitational waves emanating from a spinning neutron star.  But that was not for want of trying – and they did find some ripples from a collision of two neutron stars. However, it seems that the current crop of gravitational wave detectors, which made headlines just a few years ago for the first ever detection of any type of gravitational wave, are simply not sensitive enough to pick up the slightly smaller waves theory predicts will come from a neutron star.

The astronomy community breathed a huge sigh of relief earlier this week when the Space Telescope Science Institute announced the Hubble Space Telescope’s major computer issues had been fixed after a grueling month of recovery work. They had to bring in every expert they could – even retired engineers and scientists — to make it happen, and their success is a tribute to the innovative and creative engineers that NASA has been famous for over the years. But now, the telescope is back to doing what it was built to do, taking incredible pictures of the cosmos and sending them down to Earth.  

Here are the first images since the remote repair, two pictures of galaxies. One shows a galaxy with unusual extended spiral arms, and the other is the first high-resolution view of an intriguing pair of colliding galaxies.

NASA says that other initial targets for Hubble include globular star clusters and aurorae on the giant planet Jupiter.

All of Hubble’s science instruments have now returned to full operation, following the remote recovery work to repair a persistent and tricky computer anomaly that basically shut down the venerable 31-year-old telescope. The work was done from the Goddard Spaceflight Center in Maryland — with some experts still working from home with COVID-19 restrictions — as Hubble orbited 547 km (340 miles) above Earth.

The problem came from a glitch with Hubble’s payload computer, which controls and coordinates the observatory’s onboard science instruments. The computer problem automatically placed Hubble’s science instruments into safe mode, and initial work-arounds failed to create a lasting solution.