Space News & Blog Articles

Distances to different orbits can be hard to understand. For example, the ISS sits around 400 kilometers from Earth, whereas some satellites, such as Starlink, orbit at about 550 km. Often that is intentional, as objects in those orbits will eventually degrade their orbit and burn up in Earth’s atmosphere. However, many systems orbit a few orders of magnitude higher – such as the Galileo satellites that make up the backbone of the European Union’s satellite navigation network. At an orbit of around 23000 km, it has some advantages over lower-hanging satellites but also plenty of disadvantages too. Now, the EU was to eliminate some of those disadvantages by releasing a whole new set of lower-orbiting satnav satellites.

Astronomical images never cease to delight, and the European Southern Observatory’s image of the Vela nebula is no exception.

Gravity calculations can provide plenty of insight into a variety of phenomena. Everything from Einstein rings to the rocket equation is at least partially dependent on gravity. Now an undergraduate student and professor team from MIT think they have a new use for gravity calculations – understanding the interior density of asteroids.

Why 2022 may be a banner year for the November Taurid meteors.

SpaceX launched its gigantic Falcon Heavy rocket for the first time in more than three years, sending satellites for the military to orbit. The rocket took off amid heavy fog at Kennedy Space Center on Tuesday, November 1, and a few minutes later two booster segments returned to Earth, sticking the side-by-side landings back at Cape Canaveral.

For decades, astronomers have advocated building radio telescopes on the far side of the Moon. This “radio-quiet” zone always faces away from Earth and would provide the perfect location to study a variety of astronomical phenomena that can’t be observed in low radio frequencies from our planet, or even by Earth-orbiting space telescopes. But the costs and logistics of such a project have pushed most of these concepts to the realm of futuristic dreams.

Edward Stone is retiring after 50 years as Project Scientist for the Voyager mission. The twin spacecraft revolutionized our understanding of our Solar System, and Stone was along for the ride every step of the way. Both spacecraft are still going, travelling deeper into interplanetary space, and still sending data home.

On May 1st, 2009, after five years on the Martian surface, the Spirit rover got stuck in a patch of soft sand (where it would remain for the rest of its mission). On February 13th, 2019, NASA officials declared that Spirit’s sister – the Opportunity rover – had concluded its mission after a planetary dust storm forced it into hibernation mode about seven months prior. And in March 2017, the Curiosity rover’s wheels showed signs of their first break, thanks to years of traveling over rough terrain. Such are the risks of sending rover missions to other planets in search of discoveries that can lead to scientific breakthroughs.

Dark matter. It’s secret. It’s dark because it doesn’t give off any light. We can’t see it, taste it, touch it, smell it, or even feel it. But, astronomers can measure this dark secret of the universe. How? By looking at galaxies and galaxy clusters. Dark matter exerts a gravitational influence on those regions, and that CAN be measured.

Roughly half a century ago, astronomers realized that the powerful radio source coming from the center of our galaxy (Sagitarrius A*) was a “monster” black hole. Since then, they have found that supermassive black holes (SMBHs) reside at the center of most massive galaxies. This leads to what is known as Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) or quasars, where the central region of a galaxy is so energetic that it outshines all of the stars in its galactic disk. In all that time, astronomers have puzzled over how these behemoths (which play a crucial role in galactic evolution) originated.

Most of us don’t think about ozone as we go about our daily lives. Yet, this pale blue gas plays a huge role in keeping our planet habitable. There’s a layer of it in Earth’s stratosphere, and it absorbs most of the ultraviolet radiation streaming from the Sun. Without the ozone layer, the UV would cause severe damage to most life on Earth. What would happen if we had an ozone hole?

Let’s talk about Phobos. We know it’s a moon of Mars and it orbits the planet once every 7.4 hours. It has a huge impact crater called Stickney. It measures about 9 km across. That’s pretty big, considering Phobos itself is 28 km across on its longest side. But, beyond that, Phobos presents something of a mystery.

Interstellar winds are powerful agents of change. For one thing, they can interrupt or shut down the process of star birth completely. That’s what a team of astronomers using the Karl Jansky Very Large Array in New Mexico found when they studied the galaxy M33. They also learned that speedy cosmic rays play a huge role in pushing those winds across interstellar space.

We want to send humans to Mars eventually, and while this will be both a historic and exciting journey, it could also be tragic and terrible, and we must also address the potential pitfalls and risks of such an adventure. The intent behind this is to allow fans of space exploration to consider the full picture of such an endeavor. The good, the bad, and the ugly.

We recently examined how and why the planet Mars could answer the longstanding question: Are we alone? There is evidence to suggest that it was once a much warmer and wetter world thanks to countless spacecraft, landers, and rovers having explored—and currently exploring—its atmosphere, surface, and interior. Here, we will examine another one of Saturn’s 83 moons, an icy world that spews geysers of water ice from giant fissures near its south pole, which is strong evidence for an interior ocean, and possibly life. Here, we will examine Enceladus.

The Mars InSight lander might be nearing the end of its life on the Red Planet, but its scientific data are still shaking up the planetary science community. That’s because it detected another Marsquake on December 24, 2021. It was a major shaker and generated surface waves that rippled across the crust of the planet. The data from that quake allowed science team members to get a better idea of the Martian crust’s structure.

In a recent study accepted to The Astrophysical Journal Letters, a team of researchers at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) investigated the potential for life on exoplanets orbiting M-dwarf stars, also known as red dwarfs, which are both smaller and cooler than our own Sun and is currently open for debate for their potential for life on their orbiting planetary bodies. The study examines how a lack of an asteroid belt might indicate a less likelihood for life on terrestrial worlds.

The hits just keep on streaming back to Earth from James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). This time, arriving to help celebrate Hallowe’en, data from the MIRI mid-infrared instrument onboard JWST shows another view of the Pillars of Creation. Thousands of stars are embedded in those pillars, but many are “invisible” to MIRI.

In the beginning, there was hydrogen and helium. Other than some traces of things such as lithium, that’s all the matter the big bang produced. Everything other than those two elements was largely produced by astrophysical rather than cosmological processes. The elements we see around us, those that comprise us, were mostly formed within the hearts of stars. They were created in the furnace of stellar cores, then cast into space when the star died. But there are a few elements that are created differently. The most common one is gold.

There’s a monster black hole in our backyard (astronomically speaking). Life could survive underground on Mars for hundreds of millions of years. Starlink was hacked and now works as GPS. Bad news for Arecibo.

Trees are like sentinels that preserve a record of shifting climates. Their growth rings hold that history and dendrochronology studies those rings. Scientists can determine the exact ages of trees and correlate their growth with climatic and environmental changes.