Space News & Blog Articles

Using in-situ propellant has been a central pillar of the plan to explore much of the solar system. The logic is simple - the less mass (especially in the form of propellant) we have to take out of Earth’s gravity well, the less expensive, and therefore more plausible, the missions requiring that propellant will be. However, a new paper from Donald Rapp, the a former Division Chief Technologist at NASA’s JPL and a Co-Investigator of the successful MOXIE project on Mars, argues that, despite the allure of creating our own fuel on the Moon, it might not be worth it to develop the systems to do so. Mars, on the other hand, is a different story.

In early October, the third interstellar object (ISO) to visit our Solar System (3I/ATLAS) made its closest flyby to Mars, coming within 30 million km (18.6 million mi) of the Red Planet. This placed it within view of several missions currently operating there, which are operated by three space agencies: NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), and the China National Space Agency (CNSA). While the ESA released images taken by the Mars Express* and *ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO), and China released images taken by the Tianwen-1 orbiter, NASA was unable to release any data due to the government shutdown.

Blue Origin just achieved another impressive milestone with its new heavy-launch vehicle, the partially reusable New Glenn rocket. On Thursday, Nov. 13th, during what was only the second launch of the New Glenn (NG-2), Blue Origin launched a NASA payload destined for Mars. This was the ESCAPADE (Escape and Plasma Acceleration Dynamics Explorers) mission, a pair of twin satellites that will study how solar wind interacts with Mars’ magnetic environment and how this interaction drives atmospheric escape.

According to the leading theory of how the Earth-Moon system formed (the Giant Impact Hypothesis), a Mars-sized object (named Theia) collided with a proto-Earth 4.5 billion years ago. This turned both objects into molten lava, which eventually coalesced and cooled to form the Earth and Moon. Over time, the Moon migrated outward, eventually reaching its current, tidally locked orbit around Earth, where one side is permanently facing us. For decades, scientists have debated where Theia may have originated, whether it formed in the inner or outer Solar System.

The surface of the Earth is finite. We can measure it. If it was expanding, then its size would grow with time. And once again, good ol’ Earth helps us understand what the universe might be doing beyond our observable horizon.