Space News & Blog Articles

What imaging systems can NASA’s Artemis astronauts use on the Moon to conduct groundbreaking science and efficient documentation on the lunar surface? This is what a recent study presented at the 56th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) aspired to address as a team of researchers from the University of Texas at El Paso and Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory investigated using next-generation cameras on the Artemis III mission, which is slated to be the first lunar surface mission of the Artemis program.

A new solar observing telescope on the exterior of the International Space Station is open for business. NASA recently released images from the newly commissioned Coronal Diagnostic Experiment (CODEX) mounted on the station.

Mercury is definitely the troublemaker of our Solar System. The smallest planet orbiting our Sun is also one of the most perplexing, with characteristics so unusual that scientists are still scratching their heads about how it came to be. But new laboratory experiments are finally starting to unravel Mercury's mysteries and what they're revealing could reshape our understanding of rocky planets everywhere.

A first stage in understanding a natural phenomenon is to divide it into steps and give things labels. That gives us a way to talk about the phenomenon. But in nature, there are seldom clear divisions between processes. The entire Universe is a long-running series of intertwined causes and effects set in motion by the Big Bang.

Astronomers have found a new way of accurately mapping the outer gas disk of the Milky Way using the positions of young stars. In the process, they've also discovered that our galaxy's structure is more complex than everyone thought, complete with tufty-looking "flocculent" gas clouds.

Imagine a star so dense that a teaspoon of its material would weigh as much as Mount Everest, spinning hundreds of times per second while beaming radio waves across the universe. These are pulsars, the collapsed cores of massive stars. Some pulsars are breaking the rules of physics as we understand them, and the answer might lie in something as simple as tiny mountains on their surfaces.

When a young star forms, a ring of gas and dust called a protoplanetary disk forms around it. Together, the star and the disk are a young solar system, and peering into solar systems much younger than ours reveals clues about how planets form in protoplanetary disks. Our most powerful tool for examining these young systems is ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array.

In June 2020, the ESA's Solar Orbiter (SolO) mission launched and became the closest mission ever to orbit the Sun and take images of its surface. In March 2025, the mission made history by becoming the first probe to acquire images of the Sun's polar regions. Until now, all missions have taken images of the Sun's equatorial region because it corresponded to their orbits around the ecliptic plane. But thanks to the Solar Orbiter spacecraft's tilted orbit, it was able to observe the Sun from a whole new perspective.

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, constructed in Chile's Atacama Desert, houses perhaps the most powerful survey telescope ever built. Named after the pioneering astronomer who provided crucial evidence for dark matter, the telescope features an 8.4-meter primary mirror and the world's largest digital camera at 3.2 gigapixels. It’s plan…. to conduct the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), photographing the entire visible southern sky every few nights for ten years. This unprecedented survey will catalog billions of galaxies and stars, track moving objects throughout the Solar System, and help scientists study dark matter, dark energy, and the changing universe with remarkable precision.

Mars, often called the Red Planet due to its distinctive rusty color from iron oxide on its surface, is Earth's neighboring planet and humanity's most likely next destination for exploration. It’s about half the size of Earth and takes nearly two years to complete one orbit around the Sun. Mars is home to the largest volcano in our solar system, Olympus Mons, as well as a massive canyon system called Valles Marineris. It continues to fascinate scientists who are searching for signs of past or present life while planning for the day humans pay a visit.

Advanced telescopes take a lot of advanced technologies to build, and many times those technologies come from companies rather than the space agencies that sponsor the project. The most recent example of this is the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, or LISA, whose project sponsor recently signed a contract to begin construction of this mission that will eventually expand our search for gravitational waves.

They are known as "Hot Jupiters," massive gas giants that orbit very close to their stars. As a result, they have very short orbital periods (less than a day in some cases) and experience extreme temperatures of up to 1,650 °C (3,000 °F). In fact, these planets are superheated to the point that minerals become vaporized and form clouds in their atmospheres. While this class of planet is rare, accounting for about 500 of the more than 5,900 exoplanets confirmed to date, the existence of these planets has raised questions about our planetary formation models.

Within Earth's interior, the molten material that makes up the outer core flows around the inner core in the opposite direction of the Earth's rotation. This "dynamo" is believed to be responsible for generating Earth's magnetosphere, the intrinsic magnetic field that shields life on the surface from harmful radiation. But since the flow of molten material in Earth's core isn't perfectly stable, the magnetosphere ebbs and flows over time. Scientists also theorize that this field prevents Earth's atmosphere from being slowly stripped away by charged solar particles (solar wind), which is believed to have been the case with Mars.

In what seemed to be a development that came from nowhere, there’s a new entrant into the reusable launch systems competition - Honda. The giant Japanese industrial conglomerate recently launched a prototype reusable rocket up to 300m and landed it safely back on Earth. So what does that mean for the reusable launch vehicle (RLV) industry and the future of inexpensive flights to orbit?

The early Universe was a busy place some 13 billion years ago. That's when countless young galaxies began to evolve and birthed stars at a prodigious rate. The hearts of those very distant galaxies show turbulent, lumpy disks studded with even thicker clumps of dust and gas that spawned their huge batches of stars. Astronomers want to understand what's driving the clumping, so they've turned to recent surveys of closer galaxies in the "local Universe" that contain similar lumpy regions.

Last year, the European Space Agency (ESA) launched the Proba-3 mission to space. Comprised of two spacecraft, the Coronograph and the Occulter, it is a technology demonstrator designed to test techniques for highly-precise satellite formation flying that will pave the way for future multi-satellite missions. This past March, the two spacecraft performed a first-ever feat by flying in tandem for hours without help from mission controllers. They created an artificial solar eclipse in orbit and obtained their first images of the Sun's outer atmosphere (aka corona) in the process.

For years, astronomers have been searching for a mysterious ninth planet lurking in the dark outer reaches of our Solar System. Now, a team of researchers have taken a completely different approach to this cosmic detective story, instead of looking for reflected sunlight, they're hunting for the planet's own heat signature.

A team of astronomers has recently completed a long-range observation of a comet far from the Sun. This analysis proves that there’s lots going on, even in the icy depths of the solar system.

Regular matter is properly called baryonic matter. It's made of baryons, which are mostly protons and neutrons (but not electrons). Baryons make up the matter we interact with in everyday life, including our own bodies. Baryonic matter makes up about 5% of the Universe, while dark matter (27%) and dark energy (68%) make up the rest, according to the standard cosmological model, Lambda CDM.

As different nations begin conducting operations on the lunar surface, humanity's penchant for geopolitical struggles will likely be along for the ride. Tension between nations and/or corporations could grow. There are few rules and treaties that can calm this potential rising tension. What kinds of conflict might erupt and how can it be prevented?