Space News & Blog Articles

Astronauts lose significant amounts of muscle mass during any prolonged stay in space. Despite spending 2-3 hours a day exercising in an attempt to keep the atrophy at bay, many still struggle with health problems caused by low gravity. A new paper and some further work done by Emanuele Pulvirenti of the University of Bristol’s Soft Robotics Lab and his colleagues, describe a new type of fabric-based exoskeleton that could potentially solve at least some of the musculoskeletal problems astronauts suffer from without dramatically affecting their movement.

In 2023, gravitational wave detectors picked up the signature of a collision 7 billion light years away. Two black holes had merged in an explosion of warped space-time, but when astronomers analysed the data, they found something that violated the rules of physics. The black holes were spinning faster than any previously observed and fell within a mass range where black holes simply aren't supposed to exist.

When the James Webb Space Telescope detected potential biosignatures in the atmosphere of K2-18 b last year, the discovery sparked intense debate. Here was a sub-Neptune exoplanet 124 light years away, possibly harboring methane, carbon dioxide, and even dimethyl sulfide which is a gas produced by phytoplankton on Earth. But before we get too excited about alien life it’s necessary to understand if this planet's atmosphere can even survive the harsh environment from the host star!

The Moon has no atmosphere, no weather, and no wind. Yet it faces an invisible bombardment more relentless than any terrestrial storm, a constant rain of micrometeoroids, tiny fragments of rock and metal travelling at speeds up to 70 kilometres per second. As NASA's Artemis program prepares to establish a permanent lunar base, understanding this silent threat has become critical to keeping future astronauts safe.

The Sun produces more power than 100 trillion times humanity's entire electricity generation. In orbit, solar panels can be eight times more productive than their Earth bound counterparts, generating energy almost continuously without the need for heavy battery storage. These facts have led a team of Google researchers to ask what if the best place to scale artificial intelligence isn't on Earth at all, but in space?

Weather forecasting is notoriously wonky - climate modeling even more so. But their slowing increasing ability to predict what the natural world will throw at us humans is largely thanks to two things - better models and increased computing power. Now, a new paper from researchers led by Daniel Klocke of the Max Planck Institute in Germany, and available in pre-print form on arXiv, describes what some in the climate modeling community have described as the “holy grail” of their field - an almost kilometer-scale resolution model that combines weather forecasting with climate modeling.