Space News & Blog Articles

This is Part 1 of a series on topological defects.

NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft impacted the asteroid moonlet Dimorphos, which orbits the larger asteroid Didymos, in September 2022. The purpose of this mission was to test the kinetic impactor method, a potential strategy to alter the orbit of asteroids so they don't pose a threat to Earth. The test was a success, as images taken by the Italian Space Agency’s LICIACube (which traveled alongside the DART mission) after the impact showed. Combined with Earth-based observations, these confirmed that the moonlet's orbit changed noticeably.

Gamma-ray bursts are the most violent explosions in the universe. In a fraction of a second, they can release more energy than the Sun will emit across its entire ten billion year lifetime. Most are over before you've had time to register them, gone in seconds, minutes at most. So when something arrived on 2 July 2025 that kept going for seven hours, fired three distinct bursts spread across an entire day, and then left behind an afterglow lasting months, astronomers knew immediately they were looking at something completely new.

This is Part 2 of a series on topological defects. Read Part 1.

Our Sun is a middle aged, average star sitting in an unremarkable corner of the Milky Way. It fuses hydrogen into helium at its core, bathes its planets in light and heat, and has been doing so for around 4.6 billion years. Nothing about it immediately suggests a dramatic past. But look closer, and the questions start to stack up.

Here is a problem that has been quietly gnawing at astronomers for decades. The standard approach to detecting life on other worlds involves scanning exoplanet atmospheres for oxygen, methane and ozone, whose presence is difficult to explain without biology. It's a clever idea, but it carries a hidden flaw. That entire shopping list was written by studying Earth. It is, inevitably, a search for life like us.

One particularly well known fact about the Moon is that it doesn’t have much of a magnetosphere to speak of. There’s no blanket to protect it from the solar wind ravaging its surface, blowing away its atmosphere and charging the notoriously dangerous dust particles that make up its regolith. However, scientists have also known for around 60 years that some parts of the moon do experience sudden spikes in a magnetic field - some of which are up to 10 times stronger than the background magnetization. Since their discovery, these “lunar external magnetic enhancements” (LEMEs) have puzzled researchers - what was causing them, and why did they reach so high above the lunar surface that spacecraft could see them? A new paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters by Shu-Hua Lai and her colleagues at the National Central University in Taiwan explains for the first time what is likely causing these LEMEs - a novel type of the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability.

This is Part 3 of a series on topological defects. Read Parts 1 and 2.

Every ounce counts when launching a rocket, which is why considerations for the Size, Weight, and Power (SWaP) of every component matters so much. For decades, one of the heaviest and most power-hungry components on a spacecraft has been its optical and communications hardware - specifically the bulky mechanical mirror used for LiDAR and free-space laser communications. But a new paper, published in Nature by researchers at MIT, MITRE, and Sandia National Laboratories, might have just fundamentally changed the SWaP considerations of LiDAR systems. Their technology, which they’re called a “photonic ski-jump” could one day revolutionize how spacecraft communicate.

The Milky Way could host billions of free-floating planets (FFP) according to some research estimates. Also called rogue planets, these worlds drift through interstellar space on their own trajectories, unbound to any star. Many of these worlds form around stars like other planets do, and so it's reasonable to think that they also have moons.

The International Space Station (ISS), which has been continuously occupied for 26 years, is approaching retirement. By 2030, all participating space agencies will bring their astronauts home for the last time, and the station will be maneuvered so it burns up in Earth's atmosphere. The legacy of this station is unmatched, and its successors (of which several are planned) will have extremely big shoes to fill. Nevertheless, there's no shortage of space programs and commercial interests looking to place new space stations in orbit.

Europa is not supposed to look the way it does. Jupiter's icy moon is scarred by a chaotic patchwork of fractured terrain, criss crossed ridges, and disrupted surface regions that suggest something dynamic is happening beneath its frozen shell. Scientists have long suspected that a vast liquid ocean, kept warm by the gravitational kneading of Jupiter's enormous gravity, lies hidden beneath that ice. Now, a new study using the James Webb Space Telescope is adding a crucial piece to the puzzle, and the implications reach right to the heart of astrobiology.

Traditional chemical rockets, though they are the most commonly used propulsion method for space exploration today, are beholden to the tyranny of the rocket equation. Every ounce of thrust they use must also start out as fuel, which means the rocket itself will have to weigh more, and weight is one of the limiting factors in how fast a propulsion system can go. So, scientists have been searching for, and actively testing, alternatives for decades. One of the most promising is the solar sail - a huge reflective sheet that uses sunlight, or in some cases a “pushing laser” to maneuver about the solar system without any onboard propellant necessary. A recent paper published in the Journal of Nanophotonics by Dimitar Dimitrov and Elijah Taylor Harris of Tuskegee University describes a new type of light sail that solves some of the major problems of existing designs.

Most galaxies have a supermassive black hole at their center, but some galaxies have two. These supermassive binaries form when two galaxies collide and merge. We can detect some of these binaries, such as by observing the periodic changes of a quasar or by observing the binary directly, such as in the case of NGC 7727. But most supermassive binaries remain hidden. They are too far away to be observed directly or too inactive to be observed by jets. And while gravitational wave observatories can detect the mergers of stellar-mass black holes, we can't yet detect the mergers of supermassive black holes. But a new study shows how we might detect some of them.

This is Part 2 of a series on interstellar comets. Read Part 1.

Our first satellites were little more than repeater stations that propagated our radio and tv signals around the world. But now we live in an age where a fleet of orbiting space telescopes and satellites seeks out and examines light from across the cosmos. When a powerful burst of energy flashes elsewhere in the Universe, satellites detect it, record it, and then scientists analyze it in excruciating detail.

In addition to being a staple of science fiction, the concept of megastructures has long been the subject of serious scientific studies. As famed physicist Freeman Dyson originally proposed in 1960, "Malthusian pressures will ultimately drive an intelligent species" to occupy an "artificial biosphere which completely surrounds its parent star." In short, he theorized that advanced civilizations would disassemble their planet (or planets) to create a structure (which has since come to be called a "Dyson Sphere" that would harness all the energy from their star and provide immense living space.

The Chinese didn't invent the rocket but they came remarkably close. More than a thousand years ago, during the Song Dynasty, Chinese engineers were packing black powder into bamboo tubes and launching fire arrows that hissed across battlefields on jets of smoke and flame. Those crude devices were the distant ancestors of every launch vehicle that has ever punched through Earth's atmosphere and there's a pleasing symmetry in the fact that, today, China operates one of the most capable and ambitious space programmes on the planet. From its first satellite in 1970 to a fully operational crewed space station orbiting overhead right now, the journey has been extraordinary. And in 2026, it's about to get even more interesting.

Astronomers gain new key insights from old solar observations.

The European Southern Observatory (ESO) just released its photo of the week. This image, acquired by the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, shows the RCW 36 nebula, located about 2,300 light-years away in the Vela Constellation. But to observers, it looks like a cosmic hawk spreading its wings: the dark clouds at the center resembling the hawk's head and body, and the filaments extending to the right and left serving as the wings. And in a nice twist, the image itself was acquired by the High Acuity Wide-field K-band Imager-1 (HAWK-1) instrument on the VLT.

It's a well-known fact that if humanity wishes to explore deep space and to live and work on other planets, we need to bring Earth's environment with us. This includes life support systems that leverage biological processes - aka. Bioregenerative Life Support Systems (BLSS) - but also the many species of microbes that are essential to living systems. Humans already bring microbes with them when they travel to space, in particular, to the International Space Station (ISS). These microbes become part of the natural environment, sticking to surfaces, growing in nooks and crannies, and getting into everything.