Space News & Blog Articles

The ice giants remain some of the most interesting places to explore in the solar system. Uranus in particular has drawn a lot of interest lately, especially after the 2022 Decadal Survey from the National Academies named it as the highest priority destination. But as of now, we still don’t have a fully fleshed out and planned mission ready to go for the multiple launch windows in the 2030s. That might actually be an advantage, though, as a new system coming online might change the overall mission design fundamentally. Starship recently continued its recent string of successful tests, and a new paper presented at the IEEE Aerospace Conference by researchers at MIT looked at how this new, much more capable launch system, could impact the development of the Uranus Orbiter and Probe (UOP) that the Decadal Survey suggested.

Is anybody out there? Probably. Most stars have planets; we've discovered more than 6,000 exoplanets thus far, and the most basic statistics point toward the existence of countless potentially habitable worlds in the Universe. But when we have looked for any scrap of evidence for alien civilizations, we have found nothing so far. The question is why?

*Swarm Sees Key Changes in the Southern Atlantic Anomaly and more. *

When the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) began operations, one of its earliest surveys was of galaxies that existed during the very early Universe. In December 2022, these observations revealed multiple objects that appeared as "Little Red Dots" (LRDs), fueling speculation as to what they might be. While the current consensus is that these objects are compact, early galaxies, there is still debate over their composition and what makes them so red. On the one hand, there is the "stellar-only" hypothesis, which states that LRDs are red because they are packed with stars and dust.

When the Apollo astronauts explored the Moon from 1969 to 1972, they left behind several science experiments designed to measure the Moon's magnetic field, seismic activity, and environment. Each mission also returned with samples of rock and soil (regolith), the analysis of which revealed a wealth of information about the Moon's composition. For instance, the rocks showed that the Earth and Moon had similar structures and compositions, leading to the widely accepted theory that the Moon formed 4.5 billion years ago when a Mars-sized object (Theia) impacted primordial Earth (known as the Giant Impact Hypothesis).

In 2008, NASA's Phoenix Lander generated headlines when its thruster exposed subsurface water ice under its landing spot. It then used its robotic arm to dig beneath the surface, where it exposed more ice. Orbiters like Mars Express and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter added additional evidence for subsurface ice with radar and imaging. Now, scientists think that the planet may hold vast amounts of water ice under its surface, enough to potentially cover the entire surface of Mars with 1.5 meters of liquid water.

It is an established scientific fact that most galaxies in the Universe have a supermassive black hole (SMBH) at their center, leading to what is known as an Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN). Also known as "quasars," AGNs are notable for how they emit so much light and radiation that they temporarily outshine all of the stars in their disk. In 2019, scientists with the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration produced the very first image of an SMBH, which resides at the center of the M87 galaxy. However, about a century before this historic accomplishment was made, an astronomer detected a powerful jet coming from the center of this very same galaxy.