Space News & Blog Articles

On September 15th, 2024, the Polaris Dawn crew returned to Earth after spending five days in orbit. The mission was the first of three planned for the Polaris program, a private space project to advance human spaceflight capabilities and raise funds and awareness for charitable causes. The mission’s Dragon spacecraft safely splashed down off the coast of Florida at 3:36:54 a.m. EDT (12:36:54 p.m. PDT). Once their spacecraft was retrieved, the crew was flown to the Kennedy Space Center to see their families and undergo medical examinations before traveling to Houston to complete more of the mission’s studies.

As someone that has always lived in the UK countryside I am no stranger to the glory of a dark star-filled sky. Sadly 60% of the world’s population has already lost access to the night sky thanks to light pollution. Across Europe and the US that number climbs to nearer 80%. A team of researchers want to try and track the growth of light pollution and to that end have developed an inexpensive sensor made from “off-the-shelf” parts. Their hope is that people around the world will build and install these sensors to share their data enabling them to track the spread of light pollution. If you’ve got technical skills, this could be a fun project.

The Sun is midway through its life of fusion. It’s about five billion years old, and though its life is far from over, it will undergo some pronounced changes as it ages. Over the next billion years, the Sun will continue to brighten.

Most of the exoplanets we’ve discovered orbit red dwarf stars. This isn’t because red dwarfs are somehow special, simply that they are common. About 75% of the stars in the Milky Way are red dwarfs, so you would expect red dwarf planets to be the most abundant. This also means that most habitable worlds are going to orbit these small, cool stars, and that has some significant consequences for our search for life.

Dwarf planet Ceres is the largest planetary body in the Asteroid Belt. For a long time, scientists thought it was born in the outer solar system and then migrated to its present position. Some evidence for that origin lies in extensive surface deposits of ammonium-rich materials on the Cerean surface.

Additive manufacturing, also known as 3D printing, has had a profound impact on the way we do business. There is scarcely any industry that has not been affected by the adoption of this technology, and that includes spaceflight. Companies like SpaceX, Rocket Lab, Aerojet Rocketdyne, and Relativity Space have all turned to 3D printing to manufacture engines, components, and entire rockets. NASA has also 3D-printed an aluminum thrust chamber for a rocket engine and an aluminum rocket nozzle, while the ESA fashioned a 3D-printed steel floor prototype for a future Lunar Habitat.

Peanuts! Get your peanuts here! The Solar System has been passing out peanuts lately in the form of two different oddly shaped asteroids that recently passed by Earth, and both look like over-sized peanuts. The latest peanut-shaped asteroid pass was on September 16, 2024, when the near-Earth asteroid 2024 ON came within 1 million kilometers (62,000 miles) of Earth (2.6 times the Earth-Moon distance). Radar imaging revealed the asteroid was peanut-shaped because it is actually a contact binary – which means it is made of two smaller objects touching each other. NASA says the two rounded lobes are separated by a pronounced neck, and one lobe about 50% larger than the other.

We are all familiar with our one Moon but other planets have different numbers of moons; Mercury has none, Jupiter has 95 and Mars has two. A new paper proposes that Mars may actually have had a third larger moon. Why? The red planet has a triaxial shape which means it bulges just like Earth does but along a third axis. The paper suggests a massive moon could have distorted Mars into this shape.