Space News & Blog Articles

NASA’s Lucy spacecraft, currently on its way to the outer Solar System to study Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids, has a solar panel problem. Shortly after its launch last October, engineers determined that one of Lucy’s two solar panels failed to open completely. While the spacecraft has enough power to function, the team is concerned about how the unlatched panel might hinder Lucy’s performance going forward. In an attempt to fix the problem, the team will carry out a new procedure next month that is designed to unfurl the solar panel the rest of the way, and latch it firmly in place.

While the Hubble Space Telescope celebrates 32 years in orbit, like a fine wine, it has only gotten better with age as it continues to study the Universe and teach us more about our place in the cosmos. Hubble doesn’t just take breathtaking images of our Universe, but it also studies our own solar system, galaxies, and exoplanets, as well. It is this last subject where Hubble has recently been hard at work, though.

Since 2002, the United States National Research Council (NRC) has released a publication that identifies objectives and makes recommendations for science missions for NASA, the National Science Foundation, and other government agencies for the next decade. These reports, appropriately named Planetary Science Decadal Surveys, help inform future NASA missions that address the mysteries that persist in astronomy, astrophysics, earth science, and heliophysics.

Millions of stars that can grow up to 620 million miles in diameter, known as ‘red giants,’ exist in our galaxy, but it has been speculated for a while that there are some that are possibly much smaller. Now a team of astronomers at the University of Sydney have discovered several in this category and have published their findings in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Most impact craters are usually circular and fairly symmetric, but not all. This odd-shaped crater on Mars is obviously an impact crater, but it has a unique oblong shape. What happened?

In recent years, the practice of “telemedicine” has grown considerably. Similar to “telepresence” and “telecommuting,” this technology relies on high-speed internet and live-video streaming to allow a person in one part of the world to interact with people in another without being physically present. The technology has come in handy during the two-year COVID-19 pandemic, where doctors were in high demand, but physical travel was restricted.

On February 18, 2021, NASA’s Perseverance (Percy) Rover successfully landed in the dried-up lakebed known as Jezero Crater on Mars, beaming back images and video of its descent and landing to millions of space fans living on the planet that built and launched this incredible robotic explorer. With this landing came enormous excitement for a new era of robotic exploration of the Red Planet as we slowly continue to unlock the secrets of Mars and its ancient past, to include (hopefully) finding evidence of past life.

In this series we are exploring the weird and wonderful world of astronomy jargon! You’ll feel a little cooler after reading about today’s topic: sunspots!

Over the past 32 years, Hubble has made about 1.4 million observations of our Universe. Physicist Casey Handmer was curious how much of the sky has been imaged by Hubble, and so has now mapped out all of Hubble’s observations into one big picture of the sky.

Of the thousands of exoplanets we’ve discovered, most of them closely orbit red dwarf stars. Part of this is because planets with short orbital periods are easier to find, but part of this is that red dwarf stars make up about 75% of the stars in our galaxy. This propensity of close orbiting planets has some pretty big implications for “potentially habitable” worlds, not the least of which is that most of these planets are likely tidally locked to their star. Or so we’ve thought.

How dating an ancient text revealed one of the oldest observations of aurora known.

Within Jupiter’s massive system of satellites, four large moons really stand out. They’re known as the “Galilean Moons” in honor of Galileo Galilee, who made the first recorded observations of them in 1610. The innermost of these moons is the rocky moon Io, which is slightly larger than Earth’s Moon and slightly denser. With more than 400 active volcanoes on its surface, it is the most geologically active body in the Solar System.

Imagine standing on Mars, and seeing this with your own eyes.

In 1930, astronomer Clyde Tombaugh discovered the fabled “Ninth Planet” (or “Planet X”) while working at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. The existence of this body had been predicted previously based on perturbations in the orbit of Uranus and Neptune. After receiving more than 1,000 suggestions from around the world, and a debate among the Observatory’s staff, this newfound object was named Pluto – which was proposed by a young schoolgirl from Oxford (Venetia Burney).

In this series we are exploring the weird and wonderful world of astronomy jargon! You’ll be the biggest thing in town after today’s topic: galaxy clusters!

In this series we are exploring the weird and wonderful world of astronomy jargon! You’ll be off to a good start with today’s topic: the big bang theory!

There are several ways we can measure the progress of human civilization. Population growth, the rise and fall of empires, our technological ability to reach for the stars. But one simple measure is to calculate the amount of energy humans use at any given time. As humanity has spread and advanced, our ability to harness energy is one of our most useful skills. If one assumes civilizations on other planets might possess similar skills, the energy consumption of a species is a good rough measure of its technological prowess. This is the idea behind the Kardashev Scale.

In this series we are exploring the weird and wonderful world of astronomy jargon! You’ll see a glimmer of light with today’s topic: Zodiacal Light!

NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) has been having some problems getting tested since it rolled out onto launch pad 39B last month. These tests, called wet dress rehearsals, are used to find any problems with loading the propellant and verify that all of the rocket’s systems are able to handle it being exposed to cryogenics.

The South Pole-Aitken Basin on the Moon formed from a gigantic impact about 4.3 billion years ago. But that impact may have changed everything about the Moon, and explain why the lunar farside looks so different from the nearside, the side we see from Earth.

On February 14th, 2020, the SETI Insitute and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) announced a new partnership, which they appropriately named the Commensal Open-Source Multimode Interferometer Cluster Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (COSMIC SETI). This partnership will allow the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) to participate in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) for the first time in its history.