Space News & Blog Articles

Even though the guts of General Relativity are obtusely mathematical, and for decades was relegated to math departments rather than proper physics, you get to experience the technological gift of relativity every time you navigate to your favorite restaurant. GPS, the global positioning system, consists of a network of orbiting satellites constantly beaming out precise timing data. Your phone compares those signals to figure out where you are on the Earth. But there is a difference in spacetime between the surface of the Earth and the orbit of the satellites. Without taking general relativity into account, your navigation would simply be incorrect, and you’d be late for dinner.

Living in space comes with risks. For astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS), those risks occasionally make themselves intrusively apparent.

Universe Today recently examined the potential for sending humans to Jupiter’s icy moon, Europa, and the planet Venus, both despite their respective harsh surface environments. While human missions to these exceptional worlds could be possible in the future, what about farther out in the solar system to a world with much less harsh surface conditions, although still inhospitable for human life? Here, we will investigate whether Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, could be a feasible location for sending humans sometime in the future. Titan lacks the searing temperatures and crushing pressures of Venus along with the harsh radiation experienced on Europa. So, should we send humans to Titan?

First Contact. It’s a topic guaranteed to inspire a mix of emotions in people. It’s also one of the most fascinating SF scenarios we can imagine. What will people do when “they” appear? Or when we find evidence of life elsewhere in the Universe? For answers, one suggestion is to turn to a discipline called “exosociology”.

After a journey spanning almost two decades, Sierra Nevada Corporation’s Dream Chaser reusable spaceplane, named Tenacity, is officially undergoing environmental testing at NASA’s Neil Armstrong Test Facility located at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in anticipation of its maiden flight to the International Space Station (ISS), currently scheduled for April 2024. The environmental testing consists of analyzing the spacecraft’s ability to withstand rigorous vibrations during launch and re-entry, along with the harsh environment of outer space, including extreme temperature changes and vacuum conditions. This testing comes after Sierra Space announced the completion of Tenacity at its facilities in Louisville, Colorado last month, along with the delivery of Sierra Space’s cargo module, Shooting Star, to the Neil Armstrong Test Facility that same month, as well.

Testing interplanetary landers means putting them in an environment as close to their destination as possible. Mars landers are often tested in the ‘Mars Yard’ at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in South California and now, ESA are looking to build a similar test bed for the Moon.  They are mining a mateiral in Greenland known as Anorthosite to create the largest lunar test bed yet. 

One of the hardest things for many people to conceptualize when talking about how fast something is going is that they must ask, “Compared to what?” All motion only makes sense from a frame of reference, and many spacecraft traveling in the depths of the void lack any regular reference from which to understand how fast they’re going. There have been several different techniques to try to solve this problem, but one of the ones that have been in development the longest is StarNAV – a way to navigate in space using only the stars.

Nature, in its infinite inventiveness, provides natural astronomical lenses that allow us to see objects beyond the normal reach of our telescopes. They’re called gravitational lenses, and a few years ago, the Hubble Space Telescope took advantage of one of them to spot a supernova explosion in a distant galaxy.