Space News & Blog Articles

Scientists have developed a new method to identify and map plastic waste in urban areas using satellite imagery, offering new hope for tracking pollution and improving waste management in cities worldwide. The team of researchers led by Elena Aguilar from the San Diego State University, discovered that common plastic materials have unique "fingerprints" when viewed through special infrared light sensors. Just as different materials reflect sunlight differently to our eyes, plastics reflect infrared light in distinctive patterns that satellites can detect. The WorldView-3 satellite, orbiting high above Earth, captures these invisible signatures with remarkable precision, down to areas as small as 4 meters across. This breakthrough could revolutionise how we monitor urban waste, particularly in areas where traditional ground based surveys are difficult or dangerous to conduct.

We've sent some pretty interesting payloads to space since the first satellite (Sputnik 1) launched on October 4th, 1957. As access to space has increased, thanks largely to the commercial space industry, so too have the types of payloads we are sending. Consider the Nyx capsule created by German aerospace startup The Exploration Company, which launched on June 23rd from the Vandenberg Space Force Base atop a Falcon-9 rocket as part of a rideshare mission (Transporter-14). The payload for this flight (dubbed "Mission Possible") included the ashes and DNA of more than 166 deceased people provided by Celestis, a Texas-based memorial spaceflight company.

If you could see the Universe through a radio-wave "eye", you'd detect mini-halos of relativistic particles creating radio emissions around some galaxy clusters. Astronomers long figured those halos are relative "recent" happenings in the nearby Universe and didn't occur in the early epochs of cosmic history. That's all changed now that the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) radio observatory in Europe has revealed newborn galaxies in the early Universe already surrounded by a halo of particles. It's a rare look at what such clusters were like soon after they formed.

What can Earth-sized exoplanets teach scientists about the formation and evolution of exoplanets throughout the cosmos? This is what a recently submitted study hopes to address as an international team of researchers announced the discovery of an Earth-sized exoplanet that exhibits temperatures and a density comparable to Earth. This study has the potential to help scientists better understand the formation and evolution of Earth-sized exoplanets and what this could mean for finding life beyond Earth.

What can the pH level of the subsurface ocean on Enceladus tell us about finding life there? This is what a recent study accepted to Icarus hopes to address as a team of researchers investigated the potential pH level of Enceladus’ subsurface ocean based on current estimates. This study has the potential to help scientists better understand the composition of Enceladus’ subsurface ocean and what this can mean for finding life as we know it.

How accurate are the exoplanet radius measurements obtained by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS)? This is what a recent study accepted to The Astrophysical Journal hopes to address as a team of researchers investigated how hundreds of exoplanetary radii measured by TESS during its mission might be incorrect and the data could be underestimating the radii measurements. This study has the potential to help astronomers develop more efficient methods more estimating exoplanetary characteristics, which could influence whether or not they are Earth-sized.

Distant exoplanets can be dodgy to spot even in the best of observations. Despite the challenges, a team of astronomers just reported the discovery of a gas giant exoplanet that lies about 400 light-years from Earth. It's called TOI-4465 b and it takes 12 hours to transit across the face of its star during its 102-day orbit.

What is the importance of studying and utilizing lunar polar volatiles during the Artemis program, and specifically for first crewed mission, Artemis III? This is what a recent study presented at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference hopes to address as an international team of researchers investigated using lunar polar volatiles for in situ resource utilization (ISRU) purposes. In geology, volatiles are substances that vaporize at low temperatures, and examples include water, carbon dioxide, and sulfur dioxide. In the case of the Moon, key volatiles are water located in permanently shadowed regions (PSRs) at the lunar south polar region.

Spacecraft violently shake, rattle, and roll on their way into space aboard a giant explosion. Therefore, they must also be tested to make sure they can withstand those forces before getting to their orbit for deployment. One of NASA’s major observatories recently completed part of its trials, with the core portion of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope successfully completing its shock and vibration testing a few weeks ago.

Scientists are constantly finding new ways to look at things, and that’s especially true for objects that represent an outlier of their specific type. Adjectives like “biggest”, “brightest”, or “fastest spinning” all seem to attract scientific studies - perhaps because they’re an easier sell to funding agencies. No matter the reason, that means we typically get a lot of good science on specific objects that represent their particular class of objects well, and a new paper from Ozcan Caliskan from Istanbul University in Turkey hits that nail on the head when it comes to the most massive known white dwarf star.

Quasars provide some of the most spectacular light shows in the universe. However, they are typically exceedingly rare since they are caused by massive astrophysical forces that don’t happen very often. So it came as quite a surprise when scientists found a group of 11 of them hanging on in the same general area, in what appeared to be equivalent to the galactic countryside. A new paper from Yongming Liang and their co-authors at the University of Tokyo and the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan describes this finding, which they dubbed the Cosmic Himalayas, and some of the weird astronomical circumstances that place the discovery in context.

By 2028, NASA intends to land the "first woman and first person of color" on the Moon as part of the Artemis III mission. This will be the first time humans have been to the lunar surface since the Apollo astronauts last walked there in 1972. Along with international and commercial partners, NASA hopes that Artemis will enable a "sustained program of lunar exploration and development," which could include long-term facilities and habitats on the Moon. Given the expense of launching heavy payloads, sending all the equipment and materials needed to the Moon is impractical.

How do you search for a substance that doesn't give off any kind of light, but has a gravitational influence that shapes galaxies? That's the challenge researchers face as they try to find and explain the mysterious substance called dark matter. They're wrestling with an invisible "something" that appears to make up much of all matter in the Universe.

Orientation is more important than most people thing when it comes to sensing. A common example would be when the lasers of a garage door are mis-aligned, forcing the door to remain open until they are brought back in line. But when it comes to scientific sensors, orientation is even more important. So it was with great fanfare that NASA announced a new way to orient sensors on one of the most venerable of its spacecraft - the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) - and the resultant scientific discoveries it enabled.

There’s nothing to get a scientist’s heart pumping like a good, old-fashioned statistical debate. When it comes to topics like finding Earth analogues or hints of a biosignature in an atmosphere, those statistical debates could have real world consequences, both for the assignment of additional observational resources, but also for humanity’s general understanding of itself in the Universe. A new paper from two prominent exoplanet hunters, David Kipping from Columbia and Björn Benneke from UCLA, argues that their colleagues in the field of exoplanet detection have been doing statistics all wrong for decades, and make a argument for how better to present their results to the public.

Japan’s ispace sheds light on what may have caused the Resilience lunar lander failure.

Up until 1959, humans had never laid eyes on the lunar farside. In that year, the USSR's Luna 3 spacecraft flew around the Moon and sent pictures of the farside back to Earth. Though the images were grainy and black and white, they were still revealing. They showed us that the farside was different. It has more craters and fewer of the dark volcanic plains, called 'maria', that characterize the near side.

Despite the proliferation of AI based research lately, sometimes researchers need a human eye to make true discoveries. That collaboration was in evidence in a recent paper by Dr. Veselin Kostov, a research scientist at the SETI Institute and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, who led a team of almost 1,800 to review a dataset from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) that led to the discovery of almost 8,000 new eclipsing binary systems.

Population III (PopIII) stars represent astronomy's ultimate prize are the first generation of stars born from the pristine hydrogen and helium created in the Big Bang. These theoretical giants, potentially hundreds of times more massive than our Sun, should have been fundamentally different from any stars we see today. They contained virtually no “metals,” astronomy’s term for elements heavier than helium, because none existed yet in the universe.

What processes during the formation of Pluto’s largest moon, Charon, potentially led to it having cryovolcanism, and even an internal ocean? This is what a recent study presented at the 56th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference hopes to address as a team of researchers investigated the formation and evolution of Charon to ascertain whether it once possessed an internal ocean during its history and if this could have led to cryovolcanism based on images obtained by NASA’s New Horizons probe.

In the outer reaches of our Solar System, far beyond the orbit of Pluto, lies one of the most mysterious objects ever discovered, Sedna. This reddish dwarf planet follows such an extreme orbit that it takes over 11,000 years to complete a single journey around the Sun. Now, scientists are proposing a new mission to reach this distant world using a revolutionary propulsion technology.