Space News & Blog Articles

As astronomers have begun to gather data on the atmospheres of planets, we’re learning about their compositions and evolution. Thick atmospheres are the easiest to study, but these same thick atmospheres can hide the surface of a planet from view. A Venus-like world, for example, has such a thick atmosphere making it impossible to see the planet’s terrain. It seems the more likely we are to understand a planet’s atmosphere, the less likely we are to understand its surface. But that could change thanks to a new study in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astrophysical Society.

NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN) has been responsible for maintaining contact with missions venturing beyond Low Earth Orbit (LEO) since 1963. In addition to relaying communications and instructions, the DSN has sent breathtaking images and invaluable science data back to Earth. As missions become more sophisticated, the amount of data they can gather and transmit is rapidly rising. To meet these growing needs, NASA has transitioned to higher-bandwidth radio spectrum transmissions. However, there is no way to increase data rates without scaling the size of its antennas or the power of its radio transmitters.

The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, named in honor of noted physicist Enrico Fermi, has been in operation for almost a decade and a half, monitoring the cosmos for gamma rays. As the highest-energy form of light, these rays are produced by extremely energetic phenomena – like supernovae, neutron stars, quasars, and gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). In honor of this observatory’s long history, NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center has released a time-lapse movie that shows data acquired by the Fermi Space Telescope between August 2008 and August 2022.

In November, we reported how an impact on the Moon from a Chinese Long March rocket booster created an unusual double crater. For a single booster to create a double crater, some researchers thought there must have been an additional – perhaps secret – payload on the forward end of the booster, opposite from the rocket engines. But that may not necessarily be the case.

Even though the guts of General Relativity are obtusely mathematical, and for decades was relegated to math departments rather than proper physics, you get to experience the technological gift of relativity every time you navigate to your favorite restaurant. GPS, the global positioning system, consists of a network of orbiting satellites constantly beaming out precise timing data. Your phone compares those signals to figure out where you are on the Earth. But there is a difference in spacetime between the surface of the Earth and the orbit of the satellites. Without taking general relativity into account, your navigation would simply be incorrect, and you’d be late for dinner.

Living in space comes with risks. For astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS), those risks occasionally make themselves intrusively apparent.

Universe Today recently examined the potential for sending humans to Jupiter’s icy moon, Europa, and the planet Venus, both despite their respective harsh surface environments. While human missions to these exceptional worlds could be possible in the future, what about farther out in the solar system to a world with much less harsh surface conditions, although still inhospitable for human life? Here, we will investigate whether Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, could be a feasible location for sending humans sometime in the future. Titan lacks the searing temperatures and crushing pressures of Venus along with the harsh radiation experienced on Europa. So, should we send humans to Titan?

First Contact. It’s a topic guaranteed to inspire a mix of emotions in people. It’s also one of the most fascinating SF scenarios we can imagine. What will people do when “they” appear? Or when we find evidence of life elsewhere in the Universe? For answers, one suggestion is to turn to a discipline called “exosociology”.

After a journey spanning almost two decades, Sierra Nevada Corporation’s Dream Chaser reusable spaceplane, named Tenacity, is officially undergoing environmental testing at NASA’s Neil Armstrong Test Facility located at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in anticipation of its maiden flight to the International Space Station (ISS), currently scheduled for April 2024. The environmental testing consists of analyzing the spacecraft’s ability to withstand rigorous vibrations during launch and re-entry, along with the harsh environment of outer space, including extreme temperature changes and vacuum conditions. This testing comes after Sierra Space announced the completion of Tenacity at its facilities in Louisville, Colorado last month, along with the delivery of Sierra Space’s cargo module, Shooting Star, to the Neil Armstrong Test Facility that same month, as well.

Testing interplanetary landers means putting them in an environment as close to their destination as possible. Mars landers are often tested in the ‘Mars Yard’ at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in South California and now, ESA are looking to build a similar test bed for the Moon.  They are mining a mateiral in Greenland known as Anorthosite to create the largest lunar test bed yet. 

One of the hardest things for many people to conceptualize when talking about how fast something is going is that they must ask, “Compared to what?” All motion only makes sense from a frame of reference, and many spacecraft traveling in the depths of the void lack any regular reference from which to understand how fast they’re going. There have been several different techniques to try to solve this problem, but one of the ones that have been in development the longest is StarNAV – a way to navigate in space using only the stars.

Nature, in its infinite inventiveness, provides natural astronomical lenses that allow us to see objects beyond the normal reach of our telescopes. They’re called gravitational lenses, and a few years ago, the Hubble Space Telescope took advantage of one of them to spot a supernova explosion in a distant galaxy.

On December 14th, at 12:02 PM Eastern (09:02 AM Pacific), the Sun unleashed a massive solar flare. According to the Space Weather Prediction Center, part of the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), this was the strongest flare of Solar Cycle 25, which began in 2019 and will continue until 2030. What’s more, scientists at the SWPC estimate that this may be one of the most powerful solar flares recorded since 1755 when extensive recording of solar sunspot activity began.

Astronomers have been observing Saturn with the Hubble Space Telescope and several other spacecraft for decades and have noticed something unusual. During seasonal changes, transient spoke-like features appear in the rings. These dark, ghostly blobs orbit around the planet 2-3 times, and then disappear.

While it has been a favorite disaster movie theme, nuking an incoming asteroid in the real world has been touted as a very bad idea. While a nuclear bomb could possibly obliterate a smaller asteroid, nuking a larger asteroid would only break it into pieces. Those pieces would still threaten our planet, and perhaps even makes things worse by producing multiple impacts across the planet.  

A quarter century ago, physicist Juan Maldacena proposed the AdS/CFT correspondence, an intriguing holographic connection between gravity in a three-dimensional universe and quantum physics on the universe’s two-dimensional boundary. This correspondence is at this stage, even a quarter century after Maldacena’s discovery, just a conjecture. A statement about the nature of the universe that seems to be true, but one that has not yet been proven to actually reflect the reality that we live in. And what’s more, it only has limited utility and application to the real universe.

During the 1960s, the first robotic explorers began making flybys of Venus, including the Soviet Venera 1 and the Mariner 2 probes. These missions dispelled the popular myth that Venus was shrouded by dense rain clouds and had a tropical environment. Instead, these and subsequent missions revealed an extremely dense atmosphere predominantly composed of carbon dioxide. The few Venera landers that made it to the surface also confirmed that Venus is the hottest planet in the Solar System, with average temperatures of 464 °C (867 °F).

Just in time for the holidays, a new composite image of the Christmas Tree Cluster (NGC 2264) has been released. This image is a group effort: the blue and white stars in the cluster giving off X-rays are seen by Chandra, while the faint green nebula was imaged by the WIYN 0.9-meter telescope on Kitt Peak.

Understanding how star-forming works at a galactic scale is challenging in our Milky Way. While we have a general understanding of the layout of our galaxy, we can’t see all of the details head-on like we would want to if we were exploring a single galaxy for details of star formation. Luckily, we have a pretty good view of the entirety of one of the most famous galaxies in all of astronomy – M51, the Whirlpool Galaxy. Now, a team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy has completed a survey of molecules throughout the galaxy and developed a map of potential star-forming regions.

Attempts to turn string theory into a workable theory of nature have led to the potential conclusion that our universe is a hologram: that what we perceive as three spatial dimensions is actually composed of only two. The greatest realization of this hologram-led program is a proposal that goes by the awkward and clunky name of the AdS/CFT correspondence, first proposed by string theorist Juan Maldacena in the late 1990’s.

One cool thing about Uranus is that its orientation, compared to the rest of the solar system, allows a unique perspective of the planet from our home planet. It is tilted at 98° compared to the rest of the ecliptic plane. So, when viewed from Earth, we can see its North Pole and its rings in some exceptional cases. That perspective is fully displayed in an image of Uranus recently released by the European Space Agency (ESA) and captured using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).