Space News & Blog Articles

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How gravitational waves can 'see inside' black holes

What lurks at the center of a black hole? Studying the space-time ripples from black hole collisions could reveal an answer.

Quadrantid meteor shower, one of the best of the year, peaking now at the wrong time

The bright moon will interfere with the 2023 Quadrantid meteor shower this year, limiting the shooting star display.

Watch SpaceX launch 1st rocket of 2023 with EOS Sat-1 and 113 other satellites on Tuesday

SpaceX will ring in the New Year a little late with its first launch on Jan. 2 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, bringing to space several small satellites on the Transporter-6 mission.

Why time-traveling tachyons probably don't exist

Einstein toyed with the idea of faster-than-light-particles but found that such particles violated a central rule of the universe: causality.

Hubble telescope spies a swarm of stars in a cosmic beehive

The Hubble Space Telescope has collected a stunning image of the globular cluster NGC 6440 appearing almost like a cosmic bee hive surrounded by a swarm of stellar bees.

Mix a ‘space juice’ to celebrate ESA’s Juice mission!

ESA is kicking off the new year by inviting you to create a unique juice mocktail to represent the JUpiter ICy moons Explorer – also known as Juice – launching in April. The winner of the most imaginative recipe will be invited to ESA’s Social Space launch event in Darmstadt, Germany, where our favourite space juices will be served!

Native American Full Moon Names for 2023

Native American tribes each had their own full Moon names — we introduce the most commonly used ones and the traditions behind them.

The post Native American Full Moon Names for 2023 appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

On International Space Station, astronauts ring in New Year 2023 ahead of 2nd Christmas

The Expedition 68 crew rang in 2023 with holiday cheer, including Santa hats, stockings and ornaments in the United States and Russian segments.

Newfound kind of supernova can tear apart a planet's atmosphere

A special type of supernova might be able to destroy a planet's ozone layer years after the initial explosion.

January: Goodbye, Saturn (Hello, Venus)

For those well north of the equator, January’s long nights provide lots of time to enjoy the starry sky — and the stars of winter are spectacular! This month’s celestial highlights include a close pass of Saturn and Venus, a strong meteor shower, and much more. Our fun and factual Sky Tour podcast provides all the details.

The post January: Goodbye, Saturn (Hello, Venus) appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

This gorgeous spiral galaxy spotted by Hubble telescope is a yardstick for galactic expansion

The barred spiral galaxy NGC 6956 isn't just pretty to look at in this new Hubble photo, it's an essential tool for understanding the universe.

NASA sensors could help detect landfill methane from space to help limit climate change

Data from the NASA mission EMIT will help the new initiative Carbon Mapper track the greenhouse gas methane from waste sites.

Juno spacecraft recovering its memory after mind-blowing Jupiter flyby, NASA says

NASA's Juno spacecraft is recovering its memory after a download disruption following its December flyby of Jupiter.

Hubble Space Telescope delivers holiday sparkle in new image

A new Hubble Space Telescope image displays the quintessential colors of the holiday season: bright blue-white stars shine against dusty swaths shaded red.

How to watch the Quadrantids – one of the best meteor showers all year – on Jan. 2 and 3

The Quadrantid meteor shower is considered one of the best to view all year. Here's how to maximize your chances of seeing shooting stars.

China is Considering Where to Build a Lunar Research Station

The second Moon race is in full swing, with the world’s two big superpowers angling to score a new set of firsts on the lunar surface. NASA’s Artemis program recently clocked up its first success with the splashdown of Orion, but China is looking to take the lead when it comes to setting up a fully-fledged lunar research station. One of the first steps in that process – figuring out where to put it. That is what a new paper attempts to quantify, and it comes up with a practical solution – the south pole.

There are plenty of advantages to the lunar south pole. It also checks many of the boxes that the Chinese scientists were looking for when they developed their criteria for potential landing sites.

They broke those criteria into two categories- scientific and engineering constraints. Engineering constraints included considerations like the illumination a site receives, its general slope, and the ease with which explorers could access other parts of the moonscape. Scientific constraints, which this particular paper focuses on, include considerations such as water ice exposure, hydrogen abundance, and temperature.

UT Editor Fraser talks about China’s exploration plans.

The south pole, therefore, seems ideal, given its relative flatness and relatively constant temperature in the permanently shaded regions of some of its craters. Those craters also most likely hold the largest amount of frozen water deposits on the Moon, making access to them an extremely high priority for any permanent base.

It also has access to one of the oldest basins on the Moon – the South Pole – Aitken (SPA) basin. Plenty of questions about the early formation of the Moon itself and the solar system could be answered more generally by looking at the soil in the basin. 

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Want to Build Structures on the Moon? Just Blast the Regolith With Microwaves

Microwaves are useful for more than just heating up leftovers. They can also make landing pads on other worlds – at least according to research released by a consortium of scientists at the University of Central Florida, Arizona State University, and Cislune, a private company. Their research shows how a combination of sorting the lunar soil and then blasting it with microwaves can create a landing pad for future rockets on the Moon – and save any surrounding buildings from being blasted by 10,000 kph dust particles.

This system works in large part because certain minerals on the lunar surface are magnetic, and those same minerals are also very susceptible to being heated up by microwaves. In particular, a type of glassy mineral called ilmenite, which makes up about 1-2% of the Moon’s surface, is highly magnetic. 

Ilmenite forms when the Moon is blasted by small meteors and forms material called agglutinates. For older lunar soils (i.e., those that haven’t been recently blasted by a meteor), up to 60% of the soil is made up of these agglutinates, whereas only about 20% of “younger” lunar soils are. So concentrations are high enough in some places that contain significant amounts of older regolith.

Understanding regolith will be key to setting up any kind of Moon base, according to this UT interview.

So if future explorers wanted to make a landing pad, they could zap this older soil with strong microwaves to sinter it together and create a durable enough surface that would allow a rocket to land on it without sandblasting everything around. That sandblasting would be particularly wicked as there is no air to slow the dust particles down, as it would on Earth. 

The solution seems simple enough – blast the soil with microwaves to sinter it together. However, systems can always be improved, and this microwave sintering process is no exception. The researchers found that, by subjecting the regolith to a process known as beneficiation, they could increase the amount of microwaves it absorbed and, therefore, the effectiveness of the heating process.

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Earth looks stunning in this 1st full view from the NOAA-21 satellite (photos)

The Earth looks amazing in this first global view from NOAA's new NOAA-21 imaging satellite, which launched in November 2022.

See the rare 'planet parade' of 5 naked-eye planets in these photos by an astronomer

Clear skies beckoned Wednesday (Dec. 28) in Rome, allowing the Virtual Telescope Project's Gianluca Masi to get busy with a year-end broadcast.

Is there life on Mars? A NASA scientist explains in new video

NASA astrobiologist Heather Graham answers pressing questions about life on Mars.


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