Space News & Blog Articles

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Mars did Have Moving Glaciers, but They Behaved Differently in the Planet's Lower Gravity

On Earth, shifts in our climate have caused glaciers to advance and recede throughout our geological history (known as glacial and inter-glacial periods). The movement of these glaciers has carved features on the surface, including U-shaped valleys, hanging valleys, and fjords. These features are missing on Mars, leading scientists to conclude that any glaciers on its surface in the distant past were stationary. However, new research by a team of U.S. and French planetary scientists suggests that Martian glaciers did move more slowly than those on Earth.

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The Tonga Eruption Produced a 90-Meter Tsunami

The gigantic underwater Tonga volcano eruption event captured the world’s attention in January of this year. People from around the world marveled at the satellite imagery of this awesome demonstration of nature’s destructive capability. But only now are we learning that the volcano triggered something else – a tsunami wave up to 90m tall, nine times higher than the tsunamis generated by earthquakes. 

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Meet the New Vespera Telescope From Vaonis

The Vespera telescope offers power and portability in a small deep-sky imaging package.

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Flying to (Hypothetical) Planet 9: Why visit it, how could we get there, and would it surprise us like Pluto?

In a recent study submitted to Earth and Planetary Astrophysics, an international team of researchers discuss the various mission design options for reaching a hypothetical Planet 9, also known as “Planet X”, which state-of-the-art models currently estimate to possess a semi-major axis of approximately 400 astronomical units (AU). The researchers postulate that sending a spacecraft to Planet 9 could pose scientific benefits much like when NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft visited Pluto in 2015. But does Planet 9 actually exist?

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On its Hunt for Dark Energy, a Telescope Stopped to Look at the Lobster Nebula

If you thought dark matter was difficult to study, studying dark energy is even more challenging. Dark energy is perhaps the most subtle phenomenon in the universe. It drives the evolution of the cosmos, but its effects are only seen on intergalactic scales. So to study dark energy in detail, you need a great deal of observations of wide areas of the sky.

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Massive Stars don’t Always Grow Their own Planets. Sometimes They Steal Them

Recently astronomers have discovered Jupiter-sized planets orbiting at extremely large distances from giant stars. How can these stars end up with such big planets at such extreme orbits? A team of researchers has proposed that the answer is that the stars steal those planets from their neighbors.

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Alien Artifacts Could Be Hidden Across the Solar System. Here’s how we Could Search for Them.

Do aliens exist? Almost certainly. The universe is vast and ancient, and our corner of it is not particularly special. If life emerged here, it probably did elsewhere. Keep in mind this is a super broad assumption. A single instance of fossilized archaebacteria-like organisms five superclusters away would be all it takes to say, “Yes, there are aliens!” …if we could find them somehow.

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Galactic Photobombing

This image, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, appears to show two spiral galaxies colliding. In fact, they are just overlapping from our vantage point and are likely quite distant from each other. The galaxies are named SDSS J115331 and LEDA 2073461, and they lie more than a billion light-years from Earth. This ‘photobombing’ of one galaxy getting in the same picture as another was originally found by volunteers from the Galaxy Zoo project, which uses the power of crowdsourcing to find unusual galaxies in our Universe.

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Want to Stay Healthy in Space? Then you Want Artificial Gravity

Space travel presents numerous challenges, not the least of which have to do with astronaut health and safety. And the farther these missions venture from Earth, the more significant they become. Beyond Earth’s protective atmosphere and magnetosphere, there’s the threat of long-term exposure to solar and cosmic radiation. But whereas radiation exposure can be mitigated with proper shielding, there are few strategies available for dealing with the other major hazard: long-term exposure to microgravity.

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The Webb Image you’ve Been Waiting For: the Orion Nebula

This is it, folks. Feast your eyes! It’s what we’ve been training for—seeing the James Webb Space Telescope’s first detailed view of the Orion Nebula! JWST’s NIRCam gazed at this starbirth nursery and revealed incredible details hidden from view by gas and dust clouds.

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Solar Orbiter was hit by a Coronal Mass Ejection as it was About to Make a Flyby of Venus

Massive solar storms on the Sun are becoming more common as it moves into a period of increasing solar activity as part of Solar Cycle 25, which is expected to peak in 2025. There’s one spacecraft that will be very well placed to capture that increasing activity. Solar Orbiter is currently 25% of the way through its ten-year mission of observing the Sun. By 2025 it will be closer than ever to our parent star, and it has already started observing some fantastic phenomena from our Sun.

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It’s Thought to Rain Diamonds on Uranus and Neptune, and now Scientists Duplicated it in the lab

The ice giant planets of Neptune and Uranus might have just the right conditions to rain diamonds. Unfortunately we can’t go and check ourselves, so we have to rely on laboratory recreations of their atmospheres to find out. And so that’s exactly what a team of physicist did: they used a vaporized form of common plastics to find out how quickly and how easily diamonds could grow in those kinds of conditions.

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NASA Chooses a Supplier to Build its Moonwalking Spacesuits

NASA announced they have chosen Axiom Space to build the spacesuits for the next astronauts to walk on the Moon. The spacesuits will be used on the Artemis III mission, which is planned to land the first woman and the first person of color on the lunar surface.

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If Jupiter's Orbit got Weirder, it Would Actually Make Earth More Habitable

Earth is not just habitable, it’s unusually habitable. It’s rather wet for a planet so close to its Sun, it’s geologically active, and it has a stable orbit, all of which are necessary for life as we know it. But there are also secondary advantages, such as not being constantly bombarded by large asteroids, and having a rotational axis that is fairly stable. This is due in part thanks to the planet Jupiter. The giant planet has helped clear the solar system of asteroid debris and may have helped stabilize the orbits of the inner planets. So life is good. But a new study shows that if Jupiter had a different orbit, life could be even better.

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Using Virtual/Augmented Reality and Holoportation to Help Improve Mental Health for Future Mars Astronauts

We recently explored how the Apple TV+ series, For All Mankind, gives us a harsh reality check about the harshness of human space exploration. In the show, astronauts struggle, some go crazy, and a lot of them die in the pursuit of planting our flag just a little farther from home. We discussed how while For All Mankind is both science fiction while taking place in an alternate universe, our future Artemis and Mars astronauts will very likely endure the same struggles and hardships as the show’s beloved characters.

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AMAZING JWST Image, iPhone 14 and Satellites, Green Sand on Mars

How iPhone 14 will connect to satellites. Why SLS didn’t launch and when it might. Growing rice in space. And a new incredible image from James Webb. All this and more space news in this week’s episode of Space Bites.

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DART Sees Asteroid Didymos for the First Time. In two Weeks, it'll Crash Into the Moon

NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission is on its way to rendezvous with the double-asteroid Didymos. When it arrives on September 26th, DART will collide with Dimorphos – the 160-meter (525-foot) moonlet that orbits the main body – to evaluate the kinetic impact technique for the very first time. This proposed method of planetary defense consists of a spacecraft colliding with an asteroid to alter its orbit and prevent it from colliding with Earth. In July, DART took its first image of the double-asteroid, which NASA released earlier this week!

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New Animation Shows how the Artemis Missions Will use the Lunar Gateway and a Starship to put Humans Back onto the Moon

A recent YouTube video made by YouTube account, Hazegrayart, combines awesome computer animation, great music, and crisp archived audio recordings to show how NASA’s future Lunar Gateway will function for the upcoming Artemis missions. The archived audio recordings encompass only about a third of the short four and a half minutes of video, with almost the entire length being filled with a gorgeous and relaxing soundtrack as the viewer is left fixated watching a slow and methodical ballet of spaceships come together at Gateway.

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Just 2,000 Years Ago, Betelgeuse Was Yellow, Not Red

Compared to the lifespan of stars, human lives are pretty short. Stars such as Betelgeuse (in Orion) live for millions of years. Others exist for billions of years. We (if we’re lucky) get maybe 100 years (more or less). So, to us, stars don’t appear to change much over our lifetimes, unless they blow up as supernovae. But, what about over the course of 20 or 30 successive lifetimes?

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Insanely High-Resolution Images of the Sun Show its Chromosphere in Vivid Detail

New images of the Sun’s chromosphere – the lower region of the solar atmosphere — have been released, and to say they are ‘stellar’ is an understatement. Simply, they are stunning. The high-resolution images were taken with the now-fully-operational Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, located on the summit of Haleakala, Maui, in Hawai‘i. Scientists say the new observatory — with its large 4-meter (13-ft) primary mirror — will enable a new era of solar science, and provide a leap forward in understanding the Sun and its impacts on our planet.

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A Planet has Been Found Orbiting Two Stars

To date, 5,084 extrasolar planets have been confirmed in 3,811 planetary systems, with another 8,912 candidates awaiting confirmation. These discoveries have provided astronomers with a detailed sampling of the types of planets that exist in our Universe, ranging from gas giants several times the size of Jupiter to smaller, rocky bodies like Earth. So far, the vast majority of these have been discovered using indirect methods – like the Transit Method (Transit Photometry) and the Radial Velocity Method (Doppler Spectroscopy) – while the remainder has been detected using various other means.

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