Space News & Blog Articles

NASA teases JWST images, Rocket Lab launches CAPSTONE, mystery rocket’s crash site found on the Moon, how magnetars are created, ISS gets more independent from Russia and more.

If you prefer the news being videoed at you instead of reading them, we’ve got you covered! Here’s a video version of this week’s most important space and astronomy news.

Mystery Rocket Crash Site Found, ISS Independence from Russia, Space Nuclear Power

Astronomer Working With Webb Said the new Images “Almost Brought him to Tears”. We’ll see Them on July 12th

NASA continues to tease us with upcoming images from JWST. This week they held a conference where they unveiled some details about what we should expect. The telescope is in very good shape, it’s diffraction limit is almost twice better than expected. As for the first images, there was a hint that we should see ‘the deepest image of the Universe yet’ as well as data on an exoplanet. All that is coming on July 12th.

For more information on James Webb, check out this week’s episode of Weekly Space Hangout with Lee Feinberg, who is NASA Optical Telescope Element (OTE) Manager for the James Webb Space Telescope at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt. A great interview with lots of amazing insights on JWST.

NASA Funds the Development of a Nuclear Reactor on the Moon That Would Last for 10 Years

NASA’s concept of a nuclear reactor for the Moon

When the Artemis program brings humans back to the Moon, they will eventually stay, building up a research station on the lunar surface. They will need a lot of power to heat and cool the station, run their experiments and communications, and generate oxygen from local materials. They can’t rely on solar energy since the Moon is in shadow for two weeks every month. NASA has paid three companies to develop plans for 40 kW fission reactors that could work on the surface of the Moon for ten years.

It’s nice to have a feel-good story every once in a while, so here’s one to hold off the existential dread: the Earth isn’t likely to get flung off into deep space for at least 100,000 years. In fact, all of the Solar System’s planets are safe for that time frame, so there is good news all around, for you and your favorite planetary body.

Maybe it’s worth backing up a little bit. The likelihood of Earth, or any planet, being bumped from its orbit is always slim. As Newtonian physics tells us, an object in motion remains in motion unless acted upon by another force – and for something the size of a planet, it would take a significant force to push a planet off track. But there are examples of planetary reshuffling in the Solar System’s own history. One of the most broadly accepted models of Solar System formation, the Nice model, describes how the outer planets migrated early in the Solar System’s history, and would have wreaked havoc on the inner rocky worlds, possibly displacing or even swallowing smaller proto-planets in the process.

But now, researchers have done the math to show that such a migration is unlikely in the next 100,000 years. Angel Zhivkov and Ivaylo Tounchev from the Department of Mathematics and Informatics at Sofia University in Bulgaria used computer calculations to determine that the planets are likely to remain stable. Their eccentricities (how much their orbit differs from circular) will stay small, as will their inclination (how far above or below the plane of the Solar System they travel). Similarly, the semi-major axes (the radius of the longest part of an elliptical orbit) will not change significantly for any of the planets.

The Semi Major Axis of a planetary orbit. Image Credit: Sndeep81, Wikimedia Commons.

Even downgraded dwarf planet Pluto was included in this study, and diehard Pluto fans will be happy to know that it too is likely to do little more than oscillate a bit over the next 100,000 years.

So what happens after 100,000 years? The farther you go in time, the harder predictions become, as the real Universe is always a little chaotic, but Zhivkov and Tounchev believe that “with simple additional reasonings and evaluations…the Theorem could be proven for one million years.” There’s not likely to be trouble in that timespan either. And, if you’re really worried, all it would take is some additional computing power beyond what was accessible to the researchers, and “the stability of the solar system could be proved for the next five billion years,” they say.