Space News & Blog Articles

Earlier today, NASA announced that it would be increasing the cadence of its missions to meet its objectives under the Artemis Program. It is also making changes to its mission architecture to include a standard vehicle configuration and undertake one surface landing every year after 2027. In real terms, this means that a lunar landing will not take place as part of Artemis III in 2027, but during Artemis IV, currently scheduled for 2028. Instead, Artemis III will involve a rendezvous in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) to test the systems and operations for the first lunar landing in over sixty years.

Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system and has proudly boasted about this since time immemorial, with its scientific confirmation occurring by Galileo Galilei in 1610. It was later found that Jupiter has a bulging equator caused by its rapid rotation, turbulent atmosphere, and complex interior mechanisms despite its massive size, and scientists have even measured its “waistline” down to a tenth of a kilometer. Now, imagine being the largest planet in the solar system and you’re told you’re not as big as you thought. Where probably most humans would be thrilled to find this out, how do you respond if you’re Jupiter?

Radio astronomy offers scientists a means of observing the "unseen" Universe, where a wide range of natural phenomena take place that optical telescopes cannot observe. This is the purpose behind the Low-Frequency Array (LOFAR), a massive radio telescope with stations all across Europe. It is the largest and most sensitive radio telescope in the world, operating at low frequencies (10–240 MHz). After ten years of surveying the sky, the LOFAR Collaboration has produced the most detailed radio map of the Universe ever made.

Giant mpacts on Earth's surface can be cataclysmic events with far-reaching consequences. They can excavate massive craters like the Vredefort Crater. There's also growing evidence that impacts powerful enough can create a massive underground hydrothermal system of cracks and chemistry that could be conducive to life.

Estimating a mass for a potentially hazardous asteroid (PHA) is perhaps the single most important thing to understand about it, after its trajectory. Actually doing so isn’t easy though, as the mass for objects in the tens to hundreds of kilometers in size are too small to have their mass calculated by traditional radio-frequency tracking techniques. A new paper from Justin Atchison of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and his co-authors proposes a method that could find the mass of asteroids even on the smaller end of that range, but will require precise coordination.

The Sun is trying to tell us something. In the first four days of February this year, it unleashed six powerful X-class solar flares in rapid succession including one classified X8.1, the strongest in several years. For most of us, that meant some disrupted radio signals, some spectacular aurora displays, and a reminder that our nearest star is not the steady, reliable lamp we sometimes take for granted. For solar physicists, it was confirmation that we are deep inside one of the most dangerous periods the Sun has produced in a generation.

If humans are ever going to live and work in space, it is paramount that we can meet our basic needs far from home. This includes food and water, but the most vital element is a steady supply of clean air to breathe. This is especially important for long-duration missions to the Moon, Mars, and other deep space destinations. For any astronauts or inhabitants this far from Earth, opportunities for resupply missions are few and far between. To this end, NASA and other space agencies are looking to In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) as the solution.

The Solar System's icy moons are a focal point in our search for habitability and life. Among them are Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto, all Galilean moons of Jupiter. Their environmental conditions play a big role in potential habitability, but so does chemistry. Without the right molecular building blocks, life can't get started.

No two snowflakes are the same, and neither are nebulae. The NASA/ESA/CSA JWST showed how undeniable that statement is when it imaged PMR 1, also known as the Exposed Cranium Nebula (ECN). The glowing cloud of gas and dust bears an eerie resemblance to a cosmic x-ray of a human skull, complete with a double-hemisphere arrangement of grey matter.

Don’t miss the only total lunar eclipse of 2026, this coming Tuesday.

When the venerable Hubble Space Telescope made its Deep Fields studies of the early Universe, it discovered something that would puzzle astronomers to this day. When the Universe was just a few billion years old, it was already populated by several large galaxies. This mystery only deepened with the deployment of the James Webb Space Telescope, which observed an abundance of bright galaxies that existed even sooner. For astronomers, this begged the question of how such massive and evolved galaxies could exist shortly after the Big Bang.

The *New Horizons* mission made history on Jan. 1st, 2019, when it became the first spacecraft to conduct a close flyby with Arrokoth, a Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) beyond the orbit of Pluto. The images it captured of this object, revealing a snowman-shaped profile, surprised and perplexed astronomers. Since then, astronomers have debated how such objects could form in the outer reaches of the Solar System. And now, researchers at Michigan State University (MSU) believe they have found the answer, and it's really quite simple: gravitational collapse.

In this age of Mars rovers, questions about the planet's ancient past have shifted. A growing body of evidence supports the idea that Mars was once warm and wet. Now researchers are focused on the timeline of the red planet's watery past. Research efforts all come down to the ultimate question regarding the planet: Did it ever host life?

Thinking about food systems in deep space likely brings to mind something like the Martian where an astronaut is scratching barely enough food to survive out of potatoes grown in Martian regolith. Or perhaps a fancy hydroponic system on an interplanetary transport ship, with artificial lighting and all the associated technological wizardry. But a new paper published in Acta Astronautica by Tor Blomqvist and Ralph Fritsche points out that growing food is only one small part of the whole cycle of providing sustenance for astronauts in space. To really get a sense of how difficult it will be, we have to look at the whole picture.

March is the time to catch the encore performance for comet E1 Wierzchos crossing the evening sky.

Searching for past or present life on Mars is the sole driving force behind every mission we send to the Red Planet, from orbiters to landers to rovers. However, there remains a concern in the scientific community of Earth-based microbes hitching a ride on Mars-bound spacecraft, also called forward contamination. The concern is potentially mistaking Earth microbes for Mars life or Earth microbes potentially influence samples of Mars life we might find. While NASA is dedicated to mitigating it as much as possible, could new methods help determine how long Earth-based microbes could survive on Mars, this alleviating concerns for forward contamination?

The Sun regularly emits streams of charged particles (solar wind) from its upper atmosphere (the corona), which flow throughout the Solar System that interacts with Earth's magnetic field. This is what powers the beautiful aurorae visible in the Northern and Southern hemispheres (Aurora Borealis and Australis. It can also play havoc with modern technological systems, including telecommunications, GPS navigation, and electrical power grids. Since 2015, NASA's Magnetosphere Multiscale (MMS) mission has been collecting data on Earth's magnetosphere.

Young stars are known for their powerful radiation and strong winds. They can shape their gaseous surroundings, both promoting and inhibiting other stars from forming, depending on the circumstances. Their strong winds also have another effect: the stars inflate gaseous bubbles around themselves.

Supernovae explosions are hard to miss. When they explode, they can outshine all of the stars in their host galaxies for months. But understanding the physics behind these powerful phenomena requires studying their progenitors before they explode.

Asteroid mining companies are finally getting off the ground, and that is raising some concerns about the impact those activities will have on the space environment. A new paper published in Acta Astronautica from Anna Marie Brenna of the University of Waikato in New Zealand discusses a framework that she thinks might work to solve the legal challenges facing those who want to protect the space environment and those who want to exploit it.

If you’ve been following exoplanet research over the last couple of years, you’ve definitely heard of K2-18b. Located 124 light years away in the constellation Leo, it’s attracted a lot of attention as it sits squarely in its red dwarf host star’s habitable zone, and measurements of the James Webb Space Telescope show its atmosphere is rich in carbon dioxide and methane. It’s one of the prime candidates for a “Hycean” world - one where a thick hydrogen-rich atmosphere covers a global liquid water ocean. It is such an intriguing target for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) researchers that they turned two of the most powerful radio telescopes in the world to watch K2-18b’s system. A recent paper, available in pre-print on arXiv, shows that there is likely no artificial narrow-band radio signals that are equivalent to our technology level coming from the planet, despite millions of potential hits.