Space News & Blog Articles

Using archival radar images taken in the 1990s by NASA’s Magellan spacecraft, scientists have found evidence of recent active volcanism on Venus.  The images revealed a volcanic vent that changed shape and increased significantly in size over an eight-month period.

The scientists say their findings confirm long-held suspicions that the planet, which is known to have a very geologically young surface and evidence of past volcanic eruptions, is still active today.

“We made the discovery is the most likely place that there should have been new volcanism,” said Robert Herrick, a geophysicist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, speaking at a briefing on March 15, 2023 from the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Texas. “Extrapolating from a data set of one for an entire planet could be dangerous, but most scientists would say it’s pretty good evidence that being able to catch an eruption in an eight-month time frame means that others are taking place as well. It confirms there is modern geological activity on Venus.”

For the research Herrick teamed up with Scott Hensley, a radar scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to analyze full-resolution radar images captured by Magellan. They focused on an area containing two of Venus’ largest volcanoes, Ozza Mons and Maat Mons. This area has long been thought to be volcanically active, however there has been no direct evidence of recent activity.

Comparing images taken in February and October 1991, they noticed that a volcanic vent measuring 2 square kilometers (0.7 square miles) showed a major change, growing considerably larger to about 4 square km (1.5 square miles.).

Asteroid Didymos is spitting rocks out into space.

Last fall, when NASA’s DART mission impacted Didymos’ moon Dimorphos in a dramatic (and successful) attempt to change the object’s orbit, DART got a quick look at the Didymos system before the probe was purposefully smashed to pieces.

Alongside demonstrating the capability to prevent future asteroid strikes on Earth, DART also gathered new information about the dynamics of the pair of asteroids. The data collected suggests that Didymos is actively throwing material out into space, and there are likely millions of other small asteroids doing the same across the Solar System, all the time.

The popular image of an asteroid as an unchanging, solid chuck of rock has evaporated in recent years, as we’ve come to learn more about these objects. While some asteroids fit this classification, just as many do not. Asteroids are the detritus left over from the formation of the Solar System, and many of them are little more than loose rubble piles, held weakly together by gravity.

Asteroid Bennu, which was visited by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission in 2020, is a prime example. When OSIRIS-REx touched down to take a sample, it sank nearly two meters into the loose surface like a child in a ball pit. The spacecraft also unexpectedly photographed material ejecting off the asteroid and into space, indicating that these objects are more active and dynamic than once thought.

Think there’s nothing to learn through suborbital flight and that space science is only done in orbit? Think again. Recently, a group of school students in Canada asked the question: do Epi-Pens work in space? These are epinephrine-loaded injectors used to help people with allergies survive a severe attack. To get an answer, the class at St Brother André Elementary School worked with NASA, the University of Ottawa, and the non-profit Cubes in Space program to launch some Epi-Pens on suborbital flights aboard a rocket and a high-altitude balloon. The result? Post-flight analysis showed that the pens lost their efficacy in space. It was a surprise to NASA as well as to the students.

The experiment was one of many suborbital projects that have been hoisted aloft over the years. These experiments are created and flown by space agencies, companies, educational institutions, and other groups. Their work shows that not only is suborbital science alive and well, but it’s providing important results across a range of sciences. And, in the aftermath of recent shoot-downs of unknown balloons after the Chinese floated one over North America, it’s important to know that balloons, as well as rockets and other launch vehicles, are big players in suborbital research for scientific purposes.

About Suborbital Space Flight

Suborbital spaceflight is exactly what it says: flights that go up to suborbital space, but do not go into orbit around Earth. Each mission can reach outer space (that is, they get to or slightly surpass the von Kármán line at 100 kilometers above sea level). While there the vehicle spends a few minutes at apogee before returning. Those brief moments in space flight provide microgravity environments where researchers can deploy experiments in near-spaceflight conditions.

Early in spaceflight history, such flights tested spacecraft and did sounding studies of the upper atmosphere and of astrophysical targets. Today, suborbital missions take place on rocket ships and jets flying parabolic flights, as well as sounding rockets and balloons of all sizes. We may not always hear about those missions unless a celebrity is onboard, but they’re an important part of space science. They often take humans and experiments to the edge of space and back to sample valuable microgravity environments.

Exploring the Extent of Suborbital Access

People, companies, and agencies from around the world involved in suborbital science recently gathered at the 8th Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference in Broomfield, Colorado. The meeting was a chance to explore science results from recent missions as well as an opportunity to learn about the latest vehicles and programs.

Massive stars are sprinters. It might seem counterintuitive that stars 100 or 200 times more massive than our Sun could only survive for as few as 10 million years. Especially since smaller stars like our Sun can last 10 billion years. Massive stars have huge reservoirs of hydrogen to burn through, but their massive size means fusion eats through their hydrogen much more quickly.

These massive stars are destined to reach the finish line quickly and explode as supernovae. There’s no other conclusion for them. But before they explode, some of them become Wolf-Rayet stars. That stage doesn’t last long, and the James Webb Space Telescope caught one in the act.

Wolf-Rayet (WR) stars exhibit powerful stellar winds that have blown away much of their mass, their surfaces are enriched with heavy elements, and they’re much hotter than most other stars. Some of them have lost their outer hydrogen layer and are fusing helium and other heavier elements in their cores. WR stars are rare, and though there are different types and sub-classes, they all have one thing in common: they’re stars in transition.

WR 124 is a well-studied Wolf-Rayet star about 15,000 light-years away in the constellation Sagitta. The star is visually stunning and is surrounded by a nebula of expelled material called M1-67. M1-67 is about six light-years across and is about 20,000 years old.

The James Webb Space Telescope imaged WR 124 as one of its first images in 2022. The JWST’s infrared observing capability revealed more detail in the nebular halo of gas and dust that surrounds the doomed star than other telescopes have. The star’s extreme stellar winds are at work blasting material away into space, creating the short-lived nebula. The beautiful nebula is a warning sign, heralding WR 124’s explosion as a supernova in a few hundred thousand years.