Space News & Blog Articles

Something arrived in our Solar System last summer that had been travelling for longer than the Earth has existed. It came from somewhere out there in the dark between the stars, possibly from a planetary system that formed billions of years before our own Sun even ignited. We don't know exactly where it came from. We may never know. But for a brief, extraordinary window of time, this ancient wanderer passed close enough to study, and the world's astronomers dropped almost everything to watch.

In the summer of 2023, something happened that engineers had talked about for decades but few genuinely expected to see in their lifetimes. SpaceX's Starship, a stainless steel tower taller than a thirty storey building lit its thirty three engines simultaneously and lifted off from the Texas coast. It did not go entirely to plan. But it went. And when the Super Heavy booster returned in flight test five to be caught, mid air, by the enormous mechanical arms of its own launch tower, it was clear that the rules of spaceflight had fundamentally changed.

In the future, farmers on the Moon and Mars will have a big challenge: how to grow healthy food in two extremely unhealthy environments. That's because the soil on both worlds isn't at all hospitable to plants and animals. Neither are other conditions. Both are irradiated worlds, Mars has a thin atmosphere and the Moon has none at all. So, how will future colonists on either world grow their food?

It's been about 8 months since the Vera Rubin Observatory (VRO) saw first light. Now the telescope is scanning the night sky to detect transient changes and sending alerts to astronomers and observatories around the world so they can perform follow-up observations. This alert system is one of the last milestones before the VRO starts its primary endeavour: the decade-long Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST).

Imagine trying to study the foundations of an ancient city while it's still being built. The noise is deafening, the dust is everywhere, and the whole place is barely visible through the haze. That is almost exactly the challenge astronomers face when trying to understand how vast cities of hundreds of galaxies first came into being. A new discovery has just given them their best look yet.

Imagine trying to reconstruct the history of a city by studying only its oldest surviving buildings. You can't watch it being built, you can't interview the architects, all you have are the structures themselves, their materials, their arrangement, the subtle clues locked into their very fabric. That is essentially what astronomers do when they study the formation of our Galaxy, and a new study has just given them their biggest collection of clues yet.

Here's a thought experiment that keeps planetary scientists awake at night. Strip every living thing from our planet, every bacterium, every blade of grass, every creature that has ever drawn breath and ask a simple but profound question: would Earth still be a world capable of supporting life?

Earlier today, NASA announced that it would be increasing the cadence of its missions to meet its objectives under the Artemis Program. It is also making changes to its mission architecture to include a standard vehicle configuration and undertake one surface landing every year after 2027. In real terms, this means that a lunar landing will not take place as part of Artemis III in 2027, but during Artemis IV, currently scheduled for 2028. Instead, Artemis III will involve a rendezvous in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) to test the systems and operations for the first lunar landing in over sixty years.

Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system and has proudly boasted about this since time immemorial, with its scientific confirmation occurring by Galileo Galilei in 1610. It was later found that Jupiter has a bulging equator caused by its rapid rotation, turbulent atmosphere, and complex interior mechanisms despite its massive size, and scientists have even measured its “waistline” down to a tenth of a kilometer. Now, imagine being the largest planet in the solar system and you’re told you’re not as big as you thought. Where probably most humans would be thrilled to find this out, how do you respond if you’re Jupiter?

Radio astronomy offers scientists a means of observing the "unseen" Universe, where a wide range of natural phenomena take place that optical telescopes cannot observe. This is the purpose behind the Low-Frequency Array (LOFAR), a massive radio telescope with stations all across Europe. It is the largest and most sensitive radio telescope in the world, operating at low frequencies (10–240 MHz). After ten years of surveying the sky, the LOFAR Collaboration has produced the most detailed radio map of the Universe ever made.

Giant mpacts on Earth's surface can be cataclysmic events with far-reaching consequences. They can excavate massive craters like the Vredefort Crater. There's also growing evidence that impacts powerful enough can create a massive underground hydrothermal system of cracks and chemistry that could be conducive to life.

Estimating a mass for a potentially hazardous asteroid (PHA) is perhaps the single most important thing to understand about it, after its trajectory. Actually doing so isn’t easy though, as the mass for objects in the tens to hundreds of kilometers in size are too small to have their mass calculated by traditional radio-frequency tracking techniques. A new paper from Justin Atchison of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and his co-authors proposes a method that could find the mass of asteroids even on the smaller end of that range, but will require precise coordination.

The Sun is trying to tell us something. In the first four days of February this year, it unleashed six powerful X-class solar flares in rapid succession including one classified X8.1, the strongest in several years. For most of us, that meant some disrupted radio signals, some spectacular aurora displays, and a reminder that our nearest star is not the steady, reliable lamp we sometimes take for granted. For solar physicists, it was confirmation that we are deep inside one of the most dangerous periods the Sun has produced in a generation.

If humans are ever going to live and work in space, it is paramount that we can meet our basic needs far from home. This includes food and water, but the most vital element is a steady supply of clean air to breathe. This is especially important for long-duration missions to the Moon, Mars, and other deep space destinations. For any astronauts or inhabitants this far from Earth, opportunities for resupply missions are few and far between. To this end, NASA and other space agencies are looking to In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) as the solution.

The Solar System's icy moons are a focal point in our search for habitability and life. Among them are Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto, all Galilean moons of Jupiter. Their environmental conditions play a big role in potential habitability, but so does chemistry. Without the right molecular building blocks, life can't get started.

No two snowflakes are the same, and neither are nebulae. The NASA/ESA/CSA JWST showed how undeniable that statement is when it imaged PMR 1, also known as the Exposed Cranium Nebula (ECN). The glowing cloud of gas and dust bears an eerie resemblance to a cosmic x-ray of a human skull, complete with a double-hemisphere arrangement of grey matter.

Don’t miss the only total lunar eclipse of 2026, this coming Tuesday.

When the venerable Hubble Space Telescope made its Deep Fields studies of the early Universe, it discovered something that would puzzle astronomers to this day. When the Universe was just a few billion years old, it was already populated by several large galaxies. This mystery only deepened with the deployment of the James Webb Space Telescope, which observed an abundance of bright galaxies that existed even sooner. For astronomers, this begged the question of how such massive and evolved galaxies could exist shortly after the Big Bang.

The *New Horizons* mission made history on Jan. 1st, 2019, when it became the first spacecraft to conduct a close flyby with Arrokoth, a Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) beyond the orbit of Pluto. The images it captured of this object, revealing a snowman-shaped profile, surprised and perplexed astronomers. Since then, astronomers have debated how such objects could form in the outer reaches of the Solar System. And now, researchers at Michigan State University (MSU) believe they have found the answer, and it's really quite simple: gravitational collapse.

In this age of Mars rovers, questions about the planet's ancient past have shifted. A growing body of evidence supports the idea that Mars was once warm and wet. Now researchers are focused on the timeline of the red planet's watery past. Research efforts all come down to the ultimate question regarding the planet: Did it ever host life?

Thinking about food systems in deep space likely brings to mind something like the Martian where an astronaut is scratching barely enough food to survive out of potatoes grown in Martian regolith. Or perhaps a fancy hydroponic system on an interplanetary transport ship, with artificial lighting and all the associated technological wizardry. But a new paper published in Acta Astronautica by Tor Blomqvist and Ralph Fritsche points out that growing food is only one small part of the whole cycle of providing sustenance for astronauts in space. To really get a sense of how difficult it will be, we have to look at the whole picture.