Space News & Blog Articles

A renewed era of space exploration is upon us, and many exciting missions will be headed to space in the coming years. These include crewed missions to the Moon and the creation of permanent bases there. Beyond the Earth-Moon system, there are multiple proposals for crewed missions to Mars and beyond. This presents significant challenges since a one-way transit to Mars can take six to nine months. Even with new propulsion technologies like nuclear rockets, it could still take more than three months to get to Mars.

The Parker Solar Probe’s mission is to study the Sun. But the spacecraft’s instruments have nabbed some pretty impressive data on Venus, as it uses the planet for gravity assists in its ever-shrinking solar orbit.

In the winter of 1609 Galileo Galilei pointed his newly built astronomical telescope at the planet Jupiter, and saw that the mighty planet was joined by smaller points of light. Over the course of the next few months he watched as four points of lights danced around the planet.

Trying to piece together the appearance of life on Earth is a little like looking through a kaleidoscope. There are competing theories for where Earth’s water came from, and there’s incomplete evidence for how the Moon formed and what role it played in life’s emergence. There are a thousand other questions, each with competing answers. Sometimes, contradictory research is published within days of each other.

An event horizon is the ultimate wall. It’s a boundary that separates one region of the universe from another. This separation is so complete that with event horizons it becomes utterly impossible for events on one side of the boundary to ever interact with or influence anything on the other side.

While black holes might always be black, they do occasionally emit some intense bursts of light from just outside their event horizon.  Previously, what exactly caused these flares had been a mystery to science.  That mystery was solved recently by a team of researchers that used a series of supercomputers to model the details of black holes’ magnetic fields in far more detail than any previous effort.  The simulations point to the breaking and remaking of super-strong magnetic fields as the source of the super-bright flares.

Uranus and Neptune are similar planets in many ways. Both are ice giant worlds, both have atmospheres rich in methane, and both have a bluish color. But while Uranus has a pale blue-green hue, Neptune has a deep blue color. But why? Why would two planets so similar in size and composition appear so different? According to a recent study, the answer lies in their aerosols.

The Moon has orbited Earth since the Solar System’s early days. Anyone who’s ever spent time at the ocean can’t fail to notice the Moon’s effect. The Moon drives the tides even in the world’s most remote inlets and bays. And tides may be vital to life’s emergence.

Eccentricity is a measure of how circular an orbit is. An eccentricity of 0 means that the orbit a perfect circle. Anything between 0 and 1 is an elliptical orbit. An eccentricity of exactly 1 gives a parabola, which isn’t much or an orbit at all, but rather an escape trajectory. Finally, a value greater than 1 is an orbit with the shape of a hyperbola, which is also an escape trajectory.

The Moon is sure to be a hotspot of economic activity as human commercial endeavors start to expand into space.  Not only is it a ball of resources with a relatively small gravity well, but it also happens to be our nearest neighbor.  But to unlock that potential, companies will have to build up an infrastructure that will allow for the exploitation of those resources.  Enter Quantum Space, a new start-up from a group of heavy-hitting space experts looking to help make that potential a reality – by building a robotic spaceport around the moon.

Billions of years ago, Mars was a much different place than it is today. During the same period when life was first emerging on Earth, Mars had a thicker atmosphere, warmer surface temperatures, and flowing water on its surface. Evidence of this warmer, wetter past is preserved on the planet’s surface today in the form of river channels, lakebeds, alluvial fans, and sedimentary deposits. When this period began, and how long it lasted, remains the subject of much debate for scientists.

Although meteorites are known to fall all over the world, the environment and unique processes in Antarctica make them somewhat easier to find on the pristine, snowy landscape. Still, collecting meteorites in Antarctica is physically grueling and hazardous work.

Dark matter has long been a mystery to astronomers, in no small part because it is so hard to measure directly.  Its influence is plain when looking at its gravitational effects on objects such as far away galaxies, but measuring that influence directly has proved much trickier.  But now, a team of scientists thinks they have a way to measure the influence of dark matter directly – all it would require is a specialized probe that sits really far away from Earth for a while.

Our galaxy hosts loads of binary stars. So much so that the majority of all stars in the galaxy are members of a binary system. Astronomers can only find most binary systems through intense scrutiny, either by having a telescope big enough to reveal two or more stars where we once thought there was only one, or by using spectroscopy to notice the wiggling motion of one star caused by the orbit of a hidden companion.

Microlensing strikes again.  Astronomers have been using the technique to detect everything from rogue planets to the most distant star ever seen.  Now, astronomers have officially found another elusive object that has long been theorized and that we first reported on back in 2009 but has never directly detected – a rogue black hole.

Elliptical galaxies are the retirement centers of the universe. They are filled with old, red stars and have very little active star formation. Even if they wanted to, they couldn’t make more stars, since they have relatively thin stores of interstellar gas and dust. The stars inside ellipticals are just sitting there, slowly burning through their reserves of hydrogen, dying off one by one.

For anyone old enough to remember the 1980s, the Space Shuttle was an iconic symbol of spaceflight. For thirty years (1981-2011), this program flew 135 missions, which consisted of orbital science experiments, deploying satellites, launching interplanetary probes, participating in the Shuttle-Mir program, deploying the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), and constructing the International Space Station (ISS). There were also tragedies along the way, such as the Challenger (1986) and Columbia disasters (2003).

With better computers comes more battery imagery.  Or at least that’s true most of the time.  Supercomputers are extraordinarily good at image processing, so it’s normally worth it when a new algorithm comes along that they can turn their attention to.  That’s exactly what happened with an algorithm recently developed by Ph.D. student Frits Sweijen and his colleagues at Leiden University.  They used several supercomputers’ image processing power to simulate and enhance the resolution of radio images captured by the International LOFAR telescope. 

As evidenced by a recent Netflix movie, dangerous asteroids can come from anywhere.  So there was an obvious weakness in our asteroid defense system when only one of the hemispheres was covered by telescopes that constantly scan the sky.  That was the case until recently, with the expansion of the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) system into the southern hemisphere.

When young stars coalesce out of a cloud of molecular hydrogen, a disk of leftover material called a protoplanetary disk surrounds them. This disk is where planets form, and astronomers are getting better at peering into those veiled environments and watching embryonic worlds take shape. But young stars aren’t the only stars with disks of raw material rotating around them.

The master of disaster has struck again, and this time our Moon is the ominous villain.