Space News & Blog Articles

Astronomers have long been fascinated by the powerful jets emanating from black holes. These jets result from gas and dust being pulled into the black hole's gravity well, forming an accretion disk that is accelerated to velocities approaching the speed of light. While most of this material slowly accretes onto the black hole's event horizon, some will spiral away from the poles, creating powerful jets that can be seen many light-years away.

In-situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) is our best bet for “living off the land” for a future Martian base, but tracking down those resources is no easy task. As of now, we have two options - send a rover to a specific location to scout it, or monitor it from orbit. Since rovers are expensive, and there are an absolute ton of sites that we would eventually want to scout, doing so from orbit would seem a better option. But monitoring for temperature, one of the most important orbital scans we can do, is notoriously blurry - based in part on the fact that most of the main instruments used to collect data on it are a few decades old. Now, a paper from researchers at Curtin University in Australia presented at the International Astronautical Congress meeting last September uses a fancy AI-like algorithm to improve that thermal resolution, and, as a result, provided a much better map to some of the most important resources we’ll be looking for.

The NASA planet-hunting satellites Kepler and TESS scanned the skies autonomously, searching for the tiny dips in light caused by exoplanets transiting in front of their stars. Their diligent observations uncovered more than 6,000 confirmed exoplanets. As scientists examined the types of planets the spacecraft found, they discovered some patterns that need explanations.

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and a city on Mars is likely going to take even longer to build than Rome itself. At the time of the first Martian colonists, it is likely that the entirety of humanity’s industrial capacity, including the infrastructure to make critical materials like metals, will be based in the Earth-Moon system. While Mars has some iron, it also lacks many of the materials needed to make advanced materials, like boron and molybdenum. To alleviate that resource bottleneck, a new study, available in pre-print on arXiv and led by Serena Suriano and a team of researchers, offers a workaround that seems obvious in theory but difficult in practice - mine the necessary material from Main Belt asteroids.

The Pandora exoplanet mission returns its first engineering images from space.