Space News & Blog Articles

The International Space Station (ISS), which has been continuously occupied for 26 years, is approaching retirement. By 2030, all participating space agencies will bring their astronauts home for the last time, and the station will be maneuvered so it burns up in Earth's atmosphere. The legacy of this station is unmatched, and its successors (of which several are planned) will have extremely big shoes to fill. Nevertheless, there's no shortage of space programs and commercial interests looking to place new space stations in orbit.

The Milky Way could host billions of free-floating planets (FFP) according to some research estimates. Also called rogue planets, these worlds drift through interstellar space on their own trajectories, unbound to any star. Many of these worlds form around stars like other planets do, and so it's reasonable to think that they also have moons.

Every ounce counts when launching a rocket, which is why considerations for the Size, Weight, and Power (SWaP) of every component matters so much. For decades, one of the heaviest and most power-hungry components on a spacecraft has been its optical and communications hardware - specifically the bulky mechanical mirror used for LiDAR and free-space laser communications. But a new paper, published in Nature by researchers at MIT, MITRE, and Sandia National Laboratories, might have just fundamentally changed the SWaP considerations of LiDAR systems. Their technology, which they’re called a “photonic ski-jump” could one day revolutionize how spacecraft communicate.

This is Part 3 of a series on topological defects. Read Parts 1 and 2.

One particularly well known fact about the Moon is that it doesn’t have much of a magnetosphere to speak of. There’s no blanket to protect it from the solar wind ravaging its surface, blowing away its atmosphere and charging the notoriously dangerous dust particles that make up its regolith. However, scientists have also known for around 60 years that some parts of the moon do experience sudden spikes in a magnetic field - some of which are up to 10 times stronger than the background magnetization. Since their discovery, these “lunar external magnetic enhancements” (LEMEs) have puzzled researchers - what was causing them, and why did they reach so high above the lunar surface that spacecraft could see them? A new paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters by Shu-Hua Lai and her colleagues at the National Central University in Taiwan explains for the first time what is likely causing these LEMEs - a novel type of the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability.