Space News & Blog Articles

Mosses conquered some of Earth's harshest environments long before humans arrived. They cling to Himalayan peaks, spread across Antarctic ice, and colonise fresh volcanic lava. These ancient plants, among the first to transition from water to land half a billion years ago, have survived multiple mass extinctions through sheer resilience. Researcher Tomomichi Fujita from Hokkaido University wondered if that resilience extended beyond Earth's atmosphere, so he sent moss to the ultimate extreme environment - the vacuum of space.

Gravitational waves are perhaps the most extraordinary signals in modern astronomy. When black holes or neutron stars collide billions of light years away, they send ripples through spacetime itself that eventually wash over Earth, stretching and squeezing space by distances smaller than a proton. The LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA detectors exist to catch these impossibly faint whispers from the universe's most violent events, and their latest observation campaign proved remarkably successful.

The number 40,000 might not sound particularly dramatic, but it represents humanity's growing catalogue of near Earth asteroids, rocky remnants from the Solar System's violent birth that cross paths with our planet's orbit. We've come a long way since 1898, when astronomers discovered the first of these wanderers, an asteroid called Eros.

Using in-situ propellant has been a central pillar of the plan to explore much of the solar system. The logic is simple - the less mass (especially in the form of propellant) we have to take out of Earth’s gravity well, the less expensive, and therefore more plausible, the missions requiring that propellant will be. However, a new paper from Donald Rapp, the a former Division Chief Technologist at NASA’s JPL and a Co-Investigator of the successful MOXIE project on Mars, argues that, despite the allure of creating our own fuel on the Moon, it might not be worth it to develop the systems to do so. Mars, on the other hand, is a different story.

In early October, the third interstellar object (ISO) to visit our Solar System (3I/ATLAS) made its closest flyby to Mars, coming within 30 million km (18.6 million mi) of the Red Planet. This placed it within view of several missions currently operating there, which are operated by three space agencies: NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), and the China National Space Agency (CNSA). While the ESA released images taken by the Mars Express* and *ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO), and China released images taken by the Tianwen-1 orbiter, NASA was unable to release any data due to the government shutdown.

Blue Origin just achieved another impressive milestone with its new heavy-launch vehicle, the partially reusable New Glenn rocket. On Thursday, Nov. 13th, during what was only the second launch of the New Glenn (NG-2), Blue Origin launched a NASA payload destined for Mars. This was the ESCAPADE (Escape and Plasma Acceleration Dynamics Explorers) mission, a pair of twin satellites that will study how solar wind interacts with Mars’ magnetic environment and how this interaction drives atmospheric escape.