Space News & Blog Articles

In the distant past, the Solar System was rife with impacts and collisions. Millions of rocky objects zoomed chaotically through the system, smashing into each other in collisional cascades. Over time, many of them eventually became part of the rocky planets. What's left of the space rocks are mostly gathered in the main asteroid belt.

On the surface of it, Earth and Saturn's moon Titan are wildly different from one another. Earth is temperate and warmed by the Sun, liquid water flows across its surface, and life pervades its opulent biosphere. Titan is beyond the reach of the Sun's warmth, is frigid and lifeless, and orbits a gas giant that is also lifeless.

All sorts of crazy things have been suggested regarding 3I/ATLAS, the third known interstellar object that we’ve discovered. Some are simply conspiracy theories about it being an alien spacecraft, while others have been well-thought out suggestions, like using Martian-based probes to observe the comet as it streaked past the red planet. A new paper pre-published on arXiv and accepted for publication by the Research Notes of the American Astronomical Society by Samuel Grand and Geraint Jones, of the Finnish Meteorological Institute and ESA respectively, falls into the latter category, and suggests utilizing two spacecraft already en route to their separate destinations to potentially detect ions from the object’s spectacular tail that has formed as it approaches the Sun.

Earth has a long, 4.5 billion history full of momentous twists and turns. Multiple prominent events played leading roles in Earth's story. One of them is the catastrophic impact with another planetesimal early in Earth's history that not only created the Moon, but altered Earth's chemistry forever.

Dust devils are a regular occurrence on Mars. Similar to Earth, these short-lived whirlwinds emerge when surface heating occurs, causing changes in air pressure and a vertical column of wind to form. As the column pulls in surrounding air, it becomes a vortex that kicks up dust, which it carries with it across the surface. While Mars has a very thin atmosphere, less than 1% that of Earth's, the lower gravity means that its dust devils grow larger than anything we see here. And according to new research by an international research team, these dust devils will reach velocities that are higher than what we expected.

The wavelengths of radio light are so large that you can't capture a high-resolution image with a single dish. To capture an image as sharp as, say, the Hubble telescope, you'd need a radio dish tens of kilometers across. So radio astronomers took a different approach. They used an array of dozens of antennas, each capturing their own signal. Since the antennas not only capture precise data but also the precise timing of that data, astronomers can use a process known as interferometry. Light from a distant radio object reaches each antenna at a slightly different time, and by correlating the arrival times, astronomers can treat the array as a virtual antenna disk the size of the entire array. From many, one, as the saying goes.