Space News & Blog Articles

When a massive asteroid is hurtling toward Earth, the solution seems straightforward; smash a spacecraft into it and knock it off course. That’s exactly what NASA successfully did with the DART mission in 2022, they proved this concept works and dramatically altered the orbit of the asteroid Dimorphos. But new research reveals the chilling possibility that an asteroid hit in the wrong spot, and you might just be postponing the impact!

The story of minor planet discovery began in 1801 when Giuseppe Piazzi spotted Ceres between Mars and Jupiter, beginning an era of thousands of asteroid discoveries. The classification of these minor bodies has evolved dramatically over the years with Ceres itself moving from planet to asteroid to dwarf planet by 2006. Pluto's discovery in 1930 revealed an entirely different population of icy worlds in the outer Solar System, and advanced sky surveys later uncovered the Kuiper Belt populated by fascinating objects like Eris and Haumea. Today we know of hundreds of thousands of minor planets, from tiny asteroids to dwarf planets rivalling Mercury in size.

One of the issues that motivates astronomers concerns star formation. There are many unanswered questions about this fundamental process, including if it has always worked the same throughout the Universe's long history. One of the reasons the JWST was built and launched is to address this question, a testament to curiosity about the subject.

Interstellar visitors like Comet 3I/ATLAS grant astronomers a rare opportunity to study something from another solar system. It was first discovered on July 1st when it was entering the inner Solar System and was about 4.5 au from the Sun. It's an active comet with an icy nucleus, meaning it's warming up as it approaches the Sun and releasing gas and dust that form a coma and tail.

There are plenty of labs working on solutions to Kessler Syndrome, where there’s so much debris in low Earth orbit that rockets are no longer capable of reaching it without being hit with hypersonic parts of defunct equipment. While we haven’t yet gotten to the point where we’ve lost access to space, there will come a day where that will happen if we don’t do something about it. A new paper from Kazunori Takahashi of Tohoku University in Japan looks at a novel solution that uses a type of magnetic field typically seen in fusion reactors to decelerate debris using a plasma beam while balancing itself with an equal and opposite thrust on the other side.

How well do we understand the Universe if we struggle to understand its most energetic events? This question can trigger a wide-ranging philosophical or even epistemological discussion. It's the kind of question that can bring the Universe's most mysterious incidents into the foreground of busy lives.