Space News & Blog Articles

If the Ingenuity helicopter would fly at night on Mars, its very possible the whirring rotors would create enough static electricity in the extremely dry Martian atmosphere to cause the air around the craft to glow.

NEA Scout will hitch a ride to an asteroid on the Artemis 1 Moon mission.

Stars form inside vast collections of molecular hydrogen called molecular clouds, sometimes called stellar nurseries or star forming regions. Instabilities in the clouds cause gas to collapse in on itself, and when enough material gathers and the density reaches a critical stage, a star begins its life of fusion.

Power beaming is one of those technologies that can completely change the world.  Almost unlimited power wherever it is needed, whenever it’s needed, is literally a technology straight out of science fiction.  Researchers have been working on the technology for decades at this point, but there has been little commercial headway so far, so what is holding this revolutionary technology up?  A “killer app” would certainly help move it along – and that is what a team from Space Power, a private company, and the University of Surrey think they have found in the form of powering other microsatellites.

Earth has a new companion. Asteroid 2020 XL5, a newly discovered kilometer-wide carbonaceous space rock, has been discovered at Earth’s L4 Lagrange point – a place where the gravitational forces of Earth and the Sun balance out, creating a stable point in which objects can become trapped. A new paper published this week in Nature Communications confirms that 2020 XL5 will be stuck at L4 for at least another 4000 years, shepherded silently through the Solar System by the gravitational tug of our home planet.

A Chinese satellite pulled a defunct navigation satellite out of the way of other satellites on January 22nd. The satellite, called SJ-21, appeared to operate as a space tug when it grappled onto the navigation satellite from the Chinese CompassG2 network. The operation details didn’t come from Chinese authorities but a report by ExoAnalytic Solutions, a commercial space monitoring company.

We’re never able to see the far side of the moon from the Earth, but that doesn’t mean it’s that different.  Recently rovers and satellites have started exploring the lesser-known side of the moon.  They found a slightly different geology than that discovered on the near side, which might have implications for navigating the far side in the future.

Astronomers will go to great lengths for science. Recently, dozens of astronomers had the misfortune of traveling to one of the most tempting locales in the southwestern US – Las Vegas.  But they weren’t there for the city’s bright lights – they were there to observe a very dim light of a star thousands of light-years away.  And what they specifically wanted to see was the light from that star blink out for a few seconds.  That lack of light provided the exact kind of data they needed to help them determine the size of Eurybates, one of the Trojan asteroids that will be the focal point of NASA’s Lucy mission.

Solar flares are complex phenomena. They involve plasma, electromagnetic radiation across all wavelengths, activity in the Sun’s atmosphere layers, and particles travelling at near light speed. Spacecraft like NASA’s Solar and Heliophysics Observatory (SOHO) and the Parker Solar Probe shed new light on the Sun’s solar flares.

The year 2021 was a big one as far as stories from space are concerned! From start to finish, 2021 witnessed innumerable milestones and groundbreaking missions mounted by space agencies and the commercial space industry. Among them, the long-awaited launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, the arrival of the Perseverance mission, the launch of Double-Asteroid Redirect Test (DART), multiple test flights with the Starship, and the inauguration of space tourism. There was something for everyone!

Should we thank our well-behaved Sun for our comfy home on Earth?

In the grand scheme of things, the structure of a black hole is pretty simple. All you need to know is its mass, electric charge, and rotation, and you know what the structure of space and time around the black hole must be. But if you have two black holes orbiting each other, then things get really complicated. Unlike a single black hole, for which there is an exact solution to Einstein’s equations, there is no exact solution for two black holes. It’s similar to the three-body problem in Newtonian gravity. But that doesn’t mean astronomers can’t figure things out, as a couple of recent studies show.

The past month has been an exciting time for the James Webb Space Telescope! After launching on Christmas Day, the telescope spent the next few weeks deploying its mirrors, checking the individual segments, and then maneuvering to L2, where it will spend the next ten to twenty years unlocking the mysteries of the cosmos. According to NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, the Chief Science Communications Officer (CSCO) for the JWST and the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) for the ESA, James Webb will begin collecting light this summer.

Just 4,000 light-years from Earth is a strange, star-sized object. It’s been observed by radio telescopes, but astronomers aren’t sure what it is. They call it a long period transient.

Is this a closeup look at a tree stump, or an orbital view of an impact crater? At first glance, it might be hard to tell. But this image of a crater on Mars provides planetary scientists almost the same kind of climate history data about the Red Planet as tree rings provide to climate scientists here on Earth.

Is Mars home to an underwater lake? Different researchers are reaching different conclusions. Some say remote sensing from the Mars Express orbiter shows liquid water in an underground lake at Mars’ south polar region. Other researchers say clays or minerals explain the data better.

In the history of science and physics, several scholars, theories, and equations have become household names. In terms of scientists, notable examples include Pythagoras, Aristotle, Galileo, Newton, Planck, and Hawking. In terms of theories, there’s Archimede’s “Eureka,” Newton’s Apple (Universal Gravitation), and Schrodinger’s Cat (quantum mechanics). But the most famous and renowned is arguably Albert Einstein, Relativity, and the famous equation, E=mc2. In fact, Relativity may be the best-known scientific concept that few people truly understand.

There’s no surface water on Mars now, but there was a long time ago. If you ask most people interested in Mars, what’s left of it is underground and probably frozen.

What if a 10 km (6.5 mile)-wide asteroid was on a bee-line towards Earth, with an impending, calamitous impact just six months away? This was the scenario in the recent Netflix film, “Don’t Look Up.” The movie has led many to wonder if we have the resources and technology ready and available today to avert such a disaster.

Testing is key to the success of any space mission, and the more complex the mission, the more testing is required to complete it successfully.  The Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission is one of the most ambitious missions ever undertaken.  It started with the Perseverance rover, which is currently exploring Jezero crater while occasionally stopping to fill sample bottles with interesting material.  But the more impressive engineering feat is what happens next. NASA plans to launch a combination lander, rover, and ascent rocket that will land on the Martian surface, pick up the sample containers Perseverance has left behind, sterilize them, launch them back into space, and then return them to Earth.  

Unistellar’s eVscope has proven its ability to do serious astronomy, with more to come in 2022.