Space News & Blog Articles

NASA has dipped into the debate over UFOs for decades, but today the space agency said it’s commissioning an independent study team to survey a wide range of what are now known as unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAPs.

Scientists and engineers for the James Webb Space Telescope revealed that since its deployment in space, the telescope has been struck at least five times by micrometeroids, with one recent strike by an object that was larger than what pre-launch models suggested that the telescope would likely encounter.

The Universe is full of massive galaxies like ours, but astronomers don’t fully understand how they grew and evolved. They know that the first galaxies formed at least as early as 670 million years after the Big Bang. They know that mergers play a role in the growth of galaxies. Astronomers also know that supermassive black holes are involved in the growth of galaxies, but they don’t know precisely how.

On November 15th, 2020, NASA and SpaceX made history when a crewed spacecraft – the Crew Dragon Resilience – lifted off from American soil and delivered four astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS). This mission (designated Crew-1) was a culminating achievement for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program (CCP) and effectively restored domestic launch capability to the U.S. for the first time since the Space Shuttle‘s retirement in 2011. As of April, SpaceX’s launch vehicles and spacecraft were used to mount the first all-private Axiom Mission-1 and the fourth flight of the CCP (Crew-4).

We’re all familiar with the famous opening of the TV show “The Big Bang Theory”. It’s a song that begins with the verse: “The whole Universe was in a hot dense state…” performed by the BareNakedLadies band. Turns out it’s not just a cute line. The Ladies are right—it describes exactly what was going on with the Universe a long time ago. After the Big Bang, the cosmos was an intensely hot, dense, rapidly expanding soup of plasma. It was also in a cosmic “dark age” because there were no sources of light. It was just… well… dark. And hot.

Studying the universe is hard. Really hard. Like insanely, ridiculously hard. Think of the hardest thing you’ve ever done in your life, because studying the universe is quite literally exponentially way harder than whatever you came up with. Studying the universe is hard for two reasons: space and time. When we look at an object in the night sky, we’re looking back in time, as it has taken a finite amount of time for the light from that object to reach your eyes. The star Sirius is one of the brightest objects in the night sky and is located approximately 8.6 light-years from Earth. This means that when you look at it, you’re seeing what it looked like 8.6 years ago, as the speed of light is finite at 186,000 miles per second and a light year is the time it takes for light to travel in one year. Now think of something way farther away than Sirius, like the Big Bang, which supposedly took place 13.8 billion years ago. This means when scientists study the Big Bang, they’re attempting to look back in time 13.8 billion years. Even with all our advanced scientific instruments, it’s extremely hard to look back that far in time. It’s so hard that the Hubble Space Telescope has been in space since 1990 and just recently spotted the most distant single star ever detected in outer space at 12.9 billion light-years away. That’s 30 years of scanning the heavens, which is a testament to the vastness of the universe, and hence why studying the universe is hard. Because studying the universe is so hard, scientists often turn to computer simulations, or models, to help speed up the science aspect and ultimately give us a better understanding of how the universe works without waiting 30 years for the next big discovery.

In August 2012, the Curiosity rover landed in the Gale Crater on Mars and began exploring the surface for indications of past life. The rover made some profound discoveries during that time, including evidence that the crater was once a huge lakebed and detecting multiple methane spikes. The rover has also taken images of several interesting terrain features, many of which went viral after the photos were shared with the public. Time and again, these photos have proven that the tradition of seeing faces or patterns in random objects (aka. pareidolia) is alive and well when it comes to Mars!

Things are getting challenging for the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars. The latest news from Håvard Grip, its chief pilot, is that the “Little Chopper that Could” has lost its sense of direction thanks to a failed instrument. Never mind that it was designed to make only a few flights, mostly in Mars spring. Or that it’s having a hard time staying warm now that winter is coming. Now, one of its navigation sensors, called an inclinometer, has stopped working. It’s not the end of the world, though. “A nonworking navigation sensor sounds like a big deal – and it is – but it’s not necessarily an end to our flying at Mars,” Grip wrote on the Mars Helicopter blog on June 6. It turns out that the controllers have options.

On May 23, 2022, the Juno spacecraft made another close pass of Jupiter, with its suite of scientific instruments collecting data and its JunoCam visible light camera snapping photos all the while. This close pass, called a perijove, is the 42nd time the spacecraft has swung past Jupiter since Juno’s arrival in 2016.

Few things in life captivate us more than looking at images from other planets, no matter how dull these images might seem. This is especially true for Mars, as it’s where we’ve sent the most robots to explore its cold and dry surface. The very first image from the surface of Mars in July 1976 was nothing more than the Viking 1 lander’s footpad and some rocks, but no one cared about these mundane details because we were looking at an image from Mars. We were looking at the surface of another world for the first time in human history, and not only were we captivated by it, but we wanted more.

In and around our planet, there are thousands of comets and asteroids known as Near-Earth Objects (NEOs). Multiple space agencies and government affiliates are responsible for tracking them, especially those known as Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHA). These objects are so-designated because they will cross Earth’s orbit and may even collide with it someday. Considering how impacts in the past have caused mass extinctions (like the Chicxulub Impact Event that killed the dinosaurs), future impacts are something we would like to avoid!

While the Mars InSight lander is still waiting for a passing dust devil to clean off its solar panels, it appears the Perseverance rover sees dust devils several times a day.

We’re about to reach a milestone that many thought we would never reach. After years of wrangling, cost overruns, threats of cancellation, and lobbying by the science community, the James Webb Space Telescope is only weeks away from its first images.

We’ve been keeping close track of Ingeniuity’s progress here at Universe Today. Following the little helicopter that could hasn’t always been easy – with almost 30 flights logged covering over 7 kilometers and consistently breaking its own record for longest controlled power flight on another planet, Ingenuity has lived up to every expectation so far. But it’s been hard to understand just what it must feel like to fly through the Martian atmosphere – until now. 

The idea of a mirror universe is a common trope in science fiction. A world similar to ours where we might find our evil doppelganger or a version of us who actually asked out our high school crush. But the concept of a mirror universe has been often studied in theoretical cosmology, and as a new study shows, it might help us solve problems with the cosmological constant.

Are we alone in the Universe? Could there be countless sentient life forms out there just waiting to be found? Will we meet them someday and be able to exchange knowledge? Will we even recognize them as intelligent life forms if and when we see them? Or worse, will they recognize us as intelligent life? When it comes to astrobiology, the search for life in the Universe, we don’t know what to expect. Hence, the speculation and theoretical studies into these questions are so rich and varied!

When stars die they’re often not alone, and for the first time astronomers have found a companion to a supernova, lingering long after its sibling destroyed itself.

The planet Mars is calling to us. At least, that is the impression one gets when examining all the planned and proposed missions to the Red Planet in the coming decade. With so many space agencies currently sending missions there to characterize its environment, atmosphere, and geological history, it seems likely that crewed missions are right around the corner. In fact, both NASA and China have made it clear that they intend to send missions to Mars by the early 2030s that will culminate in the creation of surface habitats.

There’s no question that young solar systems are chaotic places. Cascading collisions defined our young Solar System as rocks, boulders, and planetesimals repeatedly collided. A new study based on chunks of asteroids that crashed into Earth puts a timeline to some of that chaos.

June 2022 offers early risers the chance to trace out the naked eye planets, from Mercury to Saturn.

What do two guys from Ohio, the GAIA mission, a worldwide network of ground-based telescopes, machine learning, and citizen scientists all have to do with each other? Thanks to this interesting combo of people and computers, astronomers now have more than 116,000 new variable stars to study. Until now, they knew of about 46,000 of these stars in the Milky Way Galaxy. They had observed maybe 10,000 or so in other galaxies. The discovery gives astronomers even more chances to study variables and understand why they behave the way they do.