Space News & Blog Articles

Space agencies like NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), the China National Space Agency (CNSA), and others are working to return astronauts to the Moon for the first time since the Apollo Era. Mounting missions beyond Low Earth Orbit (LEO), something that has not happened in over 50 years, presents several major challenges. One of the biggest is that resupply missions take much longer to send to the Moon and require heavier launch vehicles. Whereas the International Space Station can be resupplied in a matter of hours by a Falcon 9, missions bound for the Moon take about three days and require a Space Launch System (SLS) or the Starship.

For over a century, scientists have known that the Universe is rapidly expanding. This phenomenon, named in honor of the astronomers who independently confirmed it (Edwin Hubble and Georges Lemaître), is known as the Hubble-Lemaitre Constant (or the Cosmological Constant). By the 1990s, the Hubble Space Telescope (designed to measure this constant) revealed that the rate at which the Universe was expanding was slower during the early Universe, which was in "tension" with measurements of recent cosmic epochs. This is what led to the "Hubble Tension" in astrophysics and cosmology, and the theory of Dark Energy (DE) as a possible means of explaining the discrepancy.

Scientists have long understood that Earth's geological evolution is influenced by extraterrestrial factors. This includes the distribution of water, volatiles, and minerals from asteroids and comets within the Solar System, precious metals from nearby supernovae, and perturbances from passing stars. Basically, galactic events over the past few billion years have left their mark on Earth. According to new research from Curtin University, the structural evolution of the Milky Way galaxy also had an effect on the evolution of Earth's crust, as evidenced by ancient crystals beneath the surface.

Let’s say you’ve picked the perfect spot for building a settlement on Mars. But this opens up some pretty nasty questions. Building…what? And building….with what? There are no trees to chop down to construct temporary structures. There are no campfires you can build to keep warm while you start. There’s no…I don’t know…WILD GAME to hunt to feed yourself.

On May 21st, 2010, the Akatsuki orbiter ("Dawn" in Japanese) launched from the Tanegashima Space Center atop a H-IIA Launch Vehicle, establishing orbit around Venus in December 2015. In so doing, Akatsuki became the first interplanetary mission launched by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). For the past eight years, this mission has been continuously monitoring Venus' atmosphere to monitor its weather patterns using four types of instruments: an ultraviolet and infrared cameras, a high-speed imager, a radio science suite, and an ultra-stable oscillator.