Space News & Blog Articles

What’s the most exciting thing about the James Webb Space Telescope? The stunning images? The completion of its torturous path from concept to launch?

Micrometeoroid strikes are an unavoidable part of operating a spacecraft. But after the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was hit with a larger than expected piece of space dust earlier this year, engineers are making changes to the way the telescope will be pointed in an attempt to avoid excess or larger impacts from space dust.

The November Leonid meteors may produce a surprise outburst this weekend.

GPS and the world’s other global positioning systems all have one very limiting disadvantage: they’re global to only one world. There is no equivalent to the precise geolocation features these systems offer for any other body in our solar system. Recently, there has been an increased focus on Lunar missions, but no way for anything on the Lunar surface to know precisely where it is. Enter the European Space Agency and their Moonlight initiative, which was showcased in a recent video on their YouTube channel.

After orbiting Mars for eight long years, NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) spacecraft observed an extraordinary duo of auroras around the Red Planet that resulted from solar storms emanating from the Sun only a few days earlier on August 27. This observation is extraordinary since Mars lacks a global magnetic field so the solar flares must have been very powerful for MAVEN to detect them.

As it heads for the moon, NASA’s Orion space capsule is sending back snapshots of Earth that evoke the “blue marble” pictures taken by Apollo astronauts five decades earlier.

Even though there’s no firm date for a Mars sample return mission, the Perseverance rover is busy collecting rock samples and caching them for retrieval. We’ve known of the future Mars sample return mission for a while now, and as time goes on, we’re learning more details.

Earth is a strange world. A warm, rocky planet covered with oceans of liquid water. This strangeness is central to life on Earth, but it has been a longstanding puzzle for astronomers. Just why is our planet wet while other terrestrial worlds are dry? Where did all of Earth’s water come from?

Climate change is the single greatest threat facing our planet today. Thanks to excess carbon emissions that have been growing steadily since the mid-20th century, average temperatures continue to rise worldwide. This leads to feedback mechanisms, such as rising sea levels, extreme weather, drought, wildfires, and glacial melting. This includes the Arctic Ice Pack, the East Antarctic glacier, and the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS), which are rapidly melting and increasing global sea levels.

About a decade ago, the prospect of “asteroid mining” saw a massive surge in interest. This was due largely to the rise of the commercial space sector and the belief that harvesting resources from space would soon become a reality. What had been the stuff of science fiction and futurist predictions was now being talked about seriously in the business sector, with many claiming that the future of resource exploitation and manufacturing lay in space. Since then, there’s been a bit of a cooling off as these hopes failed to materialize in the expected timeframe.

It really, finally, actually happened. The long-waited Space Launch System (SLS) rocket carrying the Orion capsule launched successfully and is now on its way to the Moon. After years of delays — and then two scrubbed launch attempts and a rollback of the rocket to the Vehicle Assembly Building this fall  — this is the first time in 50 years that a human capable spacecraft is going to the Moon. In a way, it is fitting that Artemis launched in the dark, as the last human-rated spacecraft that launched to the Moon – Apollo 17 – also had liftoff at night.

At 5:22 AM Eastern Time on November 12, the Space Force’s (and Air Force’s) X-37B spaceplane landed back on Earth after two and a half years in orbit. The secretive spaceplane has now performed 6 missions, and the latest, OTV-6, was the longest flight yet. Details about the X-37B’s purpose are scarce, though it is clear that the vehicle is designed to serve as a testbed for advanced spaceflight capabilities. Here’s what we know about the latest mission.

What will happen to our Sun?

Our Sun is the very reason we’re alive. It provides warmth and the energy our planet needs to keep going. Now you can add photogenic to its illustrious résumé, as NASA recently photographed our giant ball of nuclear fusion doing something quite peculiar.

Can a star have a solid surface? It might sound counterintuitive. But human intuition is a response to our evolution on Earth, where up is up, down is down, and there are three states of matter. Intuition fails when it confronts the cosmos.

Way out in the universe, a long time ago, a proto-magnetar was born. The birth was heralded by a gamma-ray burst (GRB), followed by a blast of strange emissions. Astronomers once assumed that GRBs like this came from black hole births. However, observations of the new object by astronomers in England show there’s more than one way to cause a GRB. And, there’s more than one type of GRB.

On September 26th, 2022, NASA’s Double-Asteroid Redirect Test (DART) made history when it rendezvoused with the asteroid Didymos and impacted with its moonlet, Dimorphos. The purpose was to test the “Kinetic Impact” method, a means of defense against potentially-hazardous asteroids (PHAs) where a spacecraft collides with them to alter their trajectory. Based on follow-up observations, the test succeeded since DART managed to shorten Dimorphos’ orbit by 22 minutes. The impact also caused the moonlet to grow a visible tail!

A new type of heat shield was successfully tested last week, with the hopes this type of inflatable decelerator could be used in the future to land humans and large payloads on Mars or for atmospheric entry on other planets on moons.

We recently examined how and why Saturn’s icy moon, Enceladus, could answer the longstanding question: Are we alone? With its interior ocean and geysers of water ice that shoot out tens of kilometers into space that allegedly contains the ingredients for life, this small moon could be a prime target for future astrobiology missions. But Enceladus isn’t the only location in our solar system with active geysers, as another small moon near the edge of the solar system shares similar characteristics, as well. This is Neptune’s largest moon, Triton, which has been visited only once by NASA’s Voyager 2 in 1989. But are Triton’s geysers the only characteristics that make it a good target for astrobiology and finding life beyond Earth?

JWST’s MIRI is fully operational again. Have astronomers found the first strange star? The first test of an inflatable heat shield. And SLS just got hit by a Hurricane. Again.

The James Webb Space Telescope Early Release Science (ERS) program – first released on July 12th, 2022 – has proven to be a treasure trove of scientific finds and breakthroughs. Among the many areas of research it is enabling, there’s the study of Resolved Stellar Populations (RSTs), which was the subject of ERS 1334. This refers to large groups of stars close enough that individual stars can be discerned but far enough apart that telescopes can capture many of them at once. A good example is the Wolf-Lundmark-Melotte (WLM) dwarf galaxy that neighbors the Milky Way.