Space News & Blog Articles

A revolution in space manufacturing is coming. Enabled by cheaper launch costs, companies are scrambling to take advantage of easier access to the benefits space offers as a manufacturing environment. These include a constant vacuum, near absolute zero temperatures, and a lack of any significant gravity. These features would enable easier processing and manufacturing of hundreds of products, from pharmaceuticals to metal alloys. The tricky part is getting them back down to Earth, where they can be used. 

You, too, can be an asteroid hunter — thanks to a citizen-science project launched by the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. And you might even get a scientific citation.

One of the most iconic events in history is Apollo 11 landing on the lunar surface. During the descent, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin are heard relaying commands and data back and forth to mission control across 385,000 kilometers (240,000 miles) of outer space as the lunar module “Eagle” slowly inched its way into the history books.

More than a hundred years after geologists first observed how seismic waves traveled through Earth, they’ve achieved another seismic first. This time, they measured “core-transiting seismic waves” moving through Mars. The InSight lander’s seismic instrument tracked shockwaves generated by an earthquake and an impact event. Their behavior revealed for the first time that Mars very likely has a liquid core. It’s made of a single blob of molten iron alloy.

Some fifty years ago, the Apollo Program sent the first astronauts to the Moon. In addition to the many science experiments they conducted on the surface, the Apollo astronauts brought back samples of lunar rock for analysis. The Soviet Luna program sent several robotic missions to the Moon around the same time that conducted sample-return missions. The examination of these rocks revealed a great deal about the composition of the Moon and led to new theories about the formation and evolution of the Earth-Moon system.

Back in 2020 astronomers observed a Red Nova, which while enormously powerful, is on the low side of energetic events in the universe. Now an astronomer has studied the event in close detail and has come to the conclusion that we have just witnessed a star destroying its own planet.

They are known as ultra-fast outflows (UFOs), powerful space winds emitted by the supermassive black holes (SMBHs) at the center of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) – aka. “quasars.” These winds (with a fun name!) move close to the speed of light (relativistic speeds) and regulate the behavior of SMBHs during their active phase. These gas emissions are believed to fuel the process of star formation in galaxies but are not yet well understood. Astronomers are interested in learning more about them to improve our understanding of what governs galactic evolution.

Globular clusters are odd beasts. They aren’t galaxies, but like galaxies, they are a gravitationally bound collection of stars. They can contain millions of stars densely packed together, and they are old. Really old. They likely formed when the universe was only about 400 million years old. But the details of their origins are still unclear.

NASA missions can be categorized into two types. One type includes headline-grabbing missions, such as the JWST or New Horizons, that take decades to design and plan. Typically those larger missions include many flight-tested components that had already been used on other missions in the past. They are intended to conduct science experiments. But those components get tested beforehand on what the agency calls “technology demonstration” flights. These are intended to work through the kinks in technology development that might hinder the use of a system in space. Lunar Flashlight was one of those technology demonstrator missions, but unfortunately, one of the critical novel components did run into one of those kinks, and now NASA has decided to shut down the mission.

Rovers have enabled some amazing explorations of other worlds like the Moon and Mars. However, rovers are limited by the terrain they can reach. To explore inaccessible terrain, NASA is testing a versatile snake-like robot that could crawl up steep slopes, slither across ice, and even slide into lava tubes. Called Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor (or EELS), this robot could cross different terrains and create a 3D map of its surrounding to autonomously pick its course, avoiding hazards to reach its destination.

ESA’s Juice mission launched last month on April 14, beginning its long journey to explore Jupiter’s icy moons, Ganymede, Europa, and Callisto. But soon after launch, mission controllers realized a 16-meter (52.5 ft)-long antenna for a radar instrument was jammed and couldn’t deploy. The Radar for Icy Moons Exploration (RIME) antenna is mission critical, as it gathers data for the instrument that will be able to map beneath the ice at these moons.

Most people involved in some product development have had a lousy supply chain experience at least once in their careers. It would be so much easier if all the parts needed to make your product were available nearby and didn’t take much effort to get to you. That is especially true if you happen to be making your product in space – one of the most significant hurdles to developing a fully-fledged space economy is the difficulty (i.e., cost) of getting those products into space. 

Six years ago the Cassini spacecraft, which had spent nearly two decades in orbit around Saturn, finished its mission with a grand finale, plunging itself into the depths of Saturn’s atmosphere. Those last few orbits and the final plunge revealed a wealth of information about Saturn’s interior. A team of astronomers have collected all of the available data and are now painting a portrait of the interior of the solar system’s second largest planet.

Jupiter is the King, Earth is teeming with life, Venus is a weird, spacecraft-crushing hellhole, and now Saturn has the most moons. Again.

Challenges have been a mainstay of space exploration for several years at this point. In the past, they have ranged from making a potential space elevator to designing a solar power system on the Moon. The European Space Agency is continuing that tradition and has recently released a new challenge focusing on lunar resources. Called the Identifying Challenges along the Lunar ISRU Value Chain campaign, this new ESA platform is the next step in the agency’s efforts to develop an entire “value chain” of in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) technologies.

NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, was designed to find other worlds. Following in the tradition of the Kepler spacecraft, TESS has a hundred thousand stars looking for small but regular dips in their brightness. These dips are typically caused by planets as they pass in front of the star. TESS has been quite effective, logging nearly 6,000 candidate exoplanets. Confirming or rejecting these candidates takes time, but it has led to some interesting discoveries.

Be sure to set your alarm for early Wednesday morning, as the Moon occults the King of Planets.

At the extreme end of astrophysics, there are all sorts of phenomena that seem to be counter-intuitive. For example, how can an object not possibly get any brighter? For a long time, this limit, known as the Eddington limit, was thought to be an upper bound on how bright an object could be, and it was directly correlated with the mass of that object. But observations showed that some objects were even brighter than this theoretical limit, and now data collected by NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) confirms that these objects are, in fact, breaking the Eddington limit. But why?

A team of theoretical physicists have discovered a strange structure in space-time that to an outside observer would look exactly like a black hole, but upon closer inspection would be anything but: they would be defects in the very fabric of the universe.

One of the challenges of gravitational wave astronomy is moving its abilities beyond observations of stellar mass mergers. The collision of two black holes or neutron stars releases a tremendous amount of gravitational energy, but even this is a challenge to detect. Gravitational waves do not couple strongly with most matter, so it takes a tremendous amount of sensitive observations to observe. But we are getting better at it, and there are a few proposals that hope to take our observations even further. One example of this is a recent study that looks at utilizing the magnetospheres of Earth and Jupiter.

Most everyone is familiar with Olympus Mons, the largest volcano on Mars and also the largest in the Solar System. But there are several other enormous shield volcanoes on Mars. The second largest is Ascraeus Mons, and new images from ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft reveal some interesting features on the side or flank of the mountain.