Space News & Blog Articles

Laser sail propulsion is an idea that won't go away. By aiming powerful Earth-based lasers at tiny spacecraft with light sails, tiny spacecraft can be accelerated to near-relativistic speeds without carrying fuel or an energy source, and without carrying any kind of propulsion system at all. There are clear advantages to this idea, if it can be implemented.

Our Sun is a patient rotator. Over its lifetime it has shed angular momentum steadily, swept away on the solar wind, slowed by the invisible drag of its own magnetic field. From birth to death, stars typically spin down to between a hundred and a thousand times slower than their original rotation rate. It's one of the most reliable patterns in stellar physics, and astronomers have long assumed that magnetic fields interacting with the churning plasma inside a star were the mechanism behind it.

Think of the night sky and you probably picture stars as individual points of light, scattered at random. But stars are rarely born alone. They arrive in vast clusters, forged deep inside enormous clouds of gas, and within each cluster the variety is staggering. Some stars are cool, dim, and modest, only a fraction of the Sun's bulk. Others are stellar monsters, ten times heavier than our Sun and blazing with a hundred thousand times its brilliance. They burn fast and die young, but while they last, they dominate everything around them.

I have spent a fair amount of time thinking about what happens to the human body and mind under extreme conditions. But here is something I had not fully considered… when astronauts arrive in space after a lifetime on Earth, their brains still think gravity is there. And that turns out to matter rather a lot.

On top of Kitt Peak in the Arizona Desert, a robotic surveyor just completed a five year mission to catalogue the positions of tens of millions of galaxies. The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) has now created the largest, most detailed 3D map of our universe ever constructed. And it’s not done yet, its main mission has been extended through 2028.

Exoplanet science and the search for life beyond Earth continue to advance at break-neck speeds, with the number of confirmed exoplanets by NASA rapidly approaching 6,300, with 223 of those exoplanets being designated as terrestrial (rocky) exoplanets. With the promise of discovering an increasing number of Earth-sized exoplanets increasing every day, new telescopes from across the world have the opportunity to contribute to this incredible field.

You’re in the lab analyzing Martian regolith samples within your cozy Mars habitat serving on fifth human mission to Mars. The power within the habitat has been flowing flawlessly thanks to the MARS-MES (Mars Atmospheric Resource & Multimodal Energy System), including the general habitat lighting, science lab, sleeping quarters, exercise equipment, the virtual reality headsets the crew use for rest & relaxation, oxygen and fuel generation, and water. All this from converting the Martian atmosphere into workable electricity.

Imagine a mountain range many times larger than the entire Earth, floating in mid-air, held up by nothing you can see. It sounds like something from a fantasy novel but that is essentially what solar prominences are and for decades, scientists have struggled to explain how they exist at all.

If you have ever pushed your finger against the hole of a bicycle pump and felt the air grow warm as you compressed it, you already understand the physics at the heart of a new discovery about our own Galaxy. Because it turns out the Milky Way has a hot side and a cool side and the reason why comes down to exactly the same principle.