Space News & Blog Articles

Space travel takes quite a toll on the human body. Astronauts experience muscle weakness, bone loss, vision changes, and cardiovascular shifts during their time in microgravity. While scientists understand many of the immediate effects of spaceflight, questions have long been asked about whether these changes cause lasting damage, particularly to the heart and blood vessels.

In 1976, NASA's Viking 1 and 2 missions landed on Mars and began conducting the first astrobiology studies on another planet. This involved the analysis of soil samples for possible indications of organic molecules and biological processes (aka. "biosignatures"). The results of these studies were inconclusive and led to a general sense of pessimism towards the idea that Mars ever hosted life. However, the presence of features that could only have formed in the presence of flowing water - flow channels, delta fans, hydrated minerals, etc. - led to renewed astrobiology efforts by the 1990s.

Next time you're drinking a frosty iced beverage, think about the structure of the frozen chunks chilling it down. Here on Earth, we generally see ice in many forms: cubes, sleet, snow, icicles, slabs covering lakes and rivers, and glaciers. Water ice does this thanks to its hexagonal crystal lattice. That makes it less dense than nonfrozen water, which allows it to float in a drink, in a lake, and on the ocean.

Are astronomers on the precipice of discovering the first, elusive, intermediate mass black hole (IMBH)? That's been the case for a while, as different researchers present evidence of them. There's a candidate IMBH in the globular cluster Omega Centauri, and there's evidence that they're near supermassive black holes in galactic centers. Now researchers have found evidence of an IMBH devouring a star.

Imagine you're watching a balloon inflate, but instead of slowing down as it gets bigger, it keeps expanding faster and faster. That's essentially what scientists discovered about our universe in 1998 using exploding stars called supernovae. They found that some unknown force, which was subsequently named "dark energy” was pushing space itself apart at an accelerating rate. Now, after analyzing over 2,000 of these stellar explosions, researchers have found hints that dark energy might not be as constant as we thought. It may actually be changing, and possibly weakening over time.

Recreating the environment that most spacecraft experience on their missions is difficult on Earth. Many times it involves large vacuum chambers or wind tunnels that are specially designed for certain kinds of tests. But sometimes, engineers get to just do larger scale versions of the things they got to do in high school. That is the case for a recent test of ExoMars’s parachute system. A team of ESA engineers and their contractors performed a scaled up egg-drop test common in physics classes across the world. Except this one involved a stratospheric balloon the size of a football field and a helicopter.

When rocket engines fire during lunar landings, they don't just kick up a little dust. They unleash massive clouds of high speed particles that behave like natural sandblasting jets, capable of damaging expensive equipment, solar panels, and even entire habitats. As space agencies prepare for permanent lunar settlements through programs like NASA's Artemis mission, understanding this phenomenon has become a matter of survival.

The frontrunner in this new space race is, of course, NASA. They’re the only organization to have even done it before in the first place, but that was 50 years ago. And while all the technology of the Apollo program still exists in the form of blueprints and designs, all the human expertise that went into crafting those rockets and spaceships is now either retired or passed away. Besides, we’re not spending nearly as much money on the modern space program than we were in the 1950’s and 60’s, and to be quite frank, the Apollo missions were outright dangerous – they had a level of risk that is completely unacceptable to modern standards. When the Apollo 1 disaster happened, killing three astronauts during a launch dress rehearsal in 1967, NASA paused human spaceflight…for less than two years. An event like that today would likely shut down programs for at least a decade.

Finding an exoplanet in a star's habitable zone always generates interest. Each of these planets has a chance, even if it's an infinitesimal one, of hosting simple life. While the possibility of detecting life on these distant planets is remote, finding them still teaches us about exoplanet populations and solar system architectures.

From an engineering perspective, space is surprisingly hot. Or, more specifically, solar energy can make systems that need to be kept at a very cold temperature heat up much more quickly than expected, given the reputation that space has of being cold. In some cases, this heating causes issues with long-term missions, which is why NASA is actively testing a two-stage active cryogenic system to keep one important consumable as cold as possible - fuel.

A Team of astronomers have made a fascinating discovery that forces us to rethink our understanding of how dead stars behave. Using the powerful Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) radio telescope in the Netherlands, the team have found a white dwarf star that's doing something completely unexpected, sending out bright radio pulses in a strange, rhythmic pattern.

Juno's mission to Jupiter faced a host of challenges and obstacles. The gas giant is a long way from the Sun, limiting the available solar energy. The distance also makes communication with the spacecraft problematic. Add to that the complex environment, with Jupiter's massive gravitational pull and the orbital complexity of its four Galilean moons creating a constantly shifting field of gravitational interactions.

Objects in the Solar System can stand out for different reasons. Some of them are bright, some of them get too close to Earth for comfort, and others have incredible surface features or unusual compositions. But some objects stand out for their orbits. Those include Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNO).

Georgia State University’s Center for High Angular Resolution Astronomy (CHARA), a six-telescope interferometer, excels at studying stars. It's been observing them for 20 years and has contributed to 276 published papers. The University is celebrating its achievements so far, and underscoring how Georgia State evolved from an institution not known for research to one that's now considered a large research university.

If life is to be found elsewhere in our Solar System, astrobiologists believe it is likely to be simple (microbial) in nature. While most of our astrobiology efforts are currently focused on Mars, multiple missions will be sent to the outer Solar System in the coming years to search for possible signs of life inside Jupiter's icy moon Europa. For decades, scientists have theorized that life could exist beneath the moon's surface around hydrothermal vents located at the core-mantle boundary. Searching for possible evidence of this life is the purpose of the ESA's JUpiter ICy moons Explorer (JUICE) and NASA's Europa Clipper mission, which are currently en route to the Jupiter system.

Beyond plans to return astronauts to the Moon for the first time since the Apollo Era, NASA and other space agencies have their sights trained on Mars, Venus, and other deep-space destinations. To accomplish this, robust power systems are needed to provide ample power for spacecraft instruments and propulsion systems, thus reducing overall transit times. To this end, NASA is considering Radioisotope Power Systems (RPS), which have been used by the agency for over 60 years, most recently with the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers on Mars and the upcoming Dragonfly mission destined for Titan.

Black holes played a critical role in the formation of the early universe. However, astronomers have been debating for a long time just how critical, as the information we had about early black holes, which exist at high red-shifts, was relatively limited. A new paper from a group of researchers led by Sophia Geris at the University of Cambridge combined several spectra from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to add some context to the formation of black holes early in the universe, and found that there are plenty of smaller ones lurking around, and lending credence to the idea that black holes of all sizes contributed to the formation of our modern universe.

Astronomers have found a fascinating new world that challenges our understanding of planetary systems. Using NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), an international team of researchers has discovered TOI-2431 b, an Earth sized planet orbiting a nearby star just 117 light years away. What makes this discovery extraordinary isn't just the planet's size, it’s how incredibly fast it races around its star.

The interstellar medium (ISM) is the gas and dust that's spread throughout the space between stars. It's mostly hydrogen, and its density ranges from extremely diffuse regions with few atoms, to massive, dense clouds of cold molecular hydrogen that spawn stars. In between those two extremes are different types of clouds, and those clouds are anything but uniform.

Astrophysicists don't know if direct-collapse black holes are real. They were hypothesized to explain how the Universe could contain supermassive black holes (SMBH) so early. They don't require a stellar progenitor, nor do they require hierarchical merging. Instead, they collapse due to instability in a gas cloud, much like stars do.

What new exercise methods can be devised for astronauts in space under microgravity conditions? This is what a recent study conducted submitted to the 2025 Technology Collaboration Center’s (TCC) Wearables Workshop and University Challenge hopes to address as a team of Rice University engineering students developed a new type of space exercise harness that could make exercising under microgravity easier and more comfortable.