Space News & Blog Articles

Using local resources will be key to any mission to either the Moon or Mars - in large part because of how expensive it is to bring those resources up from Earth to our newest outposts. But Mars in particular has one local resource that has long been thought of as a negative - perchlorates. These chemicals, which are toxic to almost all life, make up between 0.5-1% of Martian soil, and have long been thought to be a hindrance rather than a help to our colonization efforts for the new planet. But a new paper from researchers at the Indian Institute of Science and the University of Florida shows that, when making the bricks that will build the outpost, perchlorates actually help.

In 2023, NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission delivered samples of the 4.6-billion-year-old asteroid Bennu to Earth. Upon examining them, scientists discovered that the asteroid - which existed when the Solar System was in the earliest phase of its formation - contained amino acids, the fundamental building blocks of life as we know it. These acids are responsible for the production of proteins and peptides found in DNA. Their retrieval from space confirmed what scientists had theorized decades ago: that the ingredients for life came from space.

Many factors influence a planet's habitability. The more obvious ones include being in a star's habitable zone and having a magnetic shield to protect it from radiation. But other important factors are less obvious.

The Moon paves the way among the planets in the last half of February.

Dark energy is one of those cosmological features that we are still learning about. While we can’t see it directly, we can most famously observe its effects on the universe - primarily how it is causing the expansion of the universe to speed up. But recently, physicists have begun to question even that narrative, pointing to results that show the expansion isn’t happening at the same rate our math would have predicted. In essence, dark energy might be changing over time, and that would have a huge impact on the universe’s expansion and cosmological physics in general. A new paper available in pre-print on arXiv from Dr. Slava Turyshev, who is also famously the most vocal advocate of the Solar Gravitational Lens mission, explores an alternative possibility that our data is actually just messy from inaccuracies in how we measure particular cosmological features - like supernovae.

Nobody expects hydrogen sulphide to smell pleasant. The molecule responsible for the distinctive odour of rotten eggs hardly suggests breakthrough science. Yet its detection in the atmospheres of four distant gas giants has just answered one of planetary science's most fundamental questions: what makes a planet a planet?