Space News & Blog Articles

Three amazing recent asteroid finds show what’s possible in terms of astronomy online.

The ESA/JAXA BepiColombo spacecraft made another flyby of its eventual target, Mercury. This is one of a series of Mercury flybys, as the spacecraft completes a complex set of maneuvers designed to deliver it to the innermost planet’s orbit. Its cameras captured some fantastic images of Mercury.

Ask most people what a galaxy is made up of, and they’ll say it’s made of stars. Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, hosts between about 100 to 300 billion stars, and we can see thousands of them with our unaided eyes. But most of a galaxy’s mass is actually gas, and the extent of the gas has been difficult to measure.

Here at UT, we’ve had several stories that describe the concept of a space elevator. They are designed to make it easier to get objects off Earth and into space. That, so far, has proven technically or economically infeasible, as no material is strong enough to support the structure passively, and it’s too energy-intensive to support it actively. However, it could be more viable on other worlds, such as the Moon. But what about worlds farther afield? A student team from the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs looked at the use case of a space elevator on Ceres and found that it could be done with existing technology.

Exoplanets have been discovered with a wide range of environmental conditions. WASP-76b is one of the most extreme with a dayside temperature of over 2,000 degrees. A team of researchers have found that it’s even more bizarre than first thought! It’s tidally locked to its host star so intense winds encircle the planet. They contain high quantities of iron atoms that stream from the lower to upper layers around the atmosphere.

According to Nebula Theory, stars and their systems of planets form when a massive cloud of gas and dust (a nebula) undergoes gravitational collapse at the center, forming a new star. The remaining material from the nebula then forms a disk around the star from which planets, moons, and other bodies will eventually accrete (a protoplanetary disk). This is how Earth and the many bodies that make up the Solar System came together roughly 4.5 billion years ago, eventually settling into their current orbits (after a few migrations and collisions).

In 2012, two previous dark matter detection experiments—the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) and ZonEd Proportional scintillation in Liquid Noble gases (ZEPLIN)—came together to form the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment. Since it commenced operations, this collaboration has conducted the most sensitive search ever mounted for Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) – one of the leading Dark Matter candidates. This collaboration includes around 250 scientists from 39 institutions in the U.S., U.K., Portugal, Switzerland, South Korea, and Australia.

Throughout Earth’s history, the planet’s surface has been regularly impacted by comets, meteors, and the occasional large asteroid. While these events were often destructive, sometimes to the point of triggering a mass extinction, they may have also played an important role in the emergence of life on Earth. This is especially true of the Hadean Era (ca. 4.1 to 3.8 billion years ago) and the Late Heavy Bombardment, when Earth and other planets in the inner Solar System were impacted by a disproportionately high number of asteroids and comets.

When you walk across your lawn or down the street, you move on the surface of a surprisingly layered world. Some of those layers are rock, others are molten. A surprising amount of water is mixed into those layers, as well. It turns out that most planets have more of it “deep down” than we imagined.

Popular science history paints a picture of the Greek geocentric model dominating astronomical thought beginning around the 3rd century BCE, and being the favored model for ~1,500 years. Then, suddenly (it suggests), astronomical thought was overhauled at the birth of the Renaissance by brilliant astronomers such as Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo, all of whom rejected placing the Earth at the center of the cosmos.

While NASA’s Mars Sample Return mission has experienced a setback, China is still moving forward with their plans to bring home a piece of the Red Planet. This week, officials from the China National Space Administration (CNSA) announced their sample return mission, called Tianwen-3, will blast off for Mars in 2028. It will land on the surface, retrieve a sample, and then take off again, docking with a return vehicle in orbit. They also announced another mission, Tianwen-4 will head off to Jupiter in 2030 as well as unveiling a conceptual plan for China’s first mission to test defenses against a near-Earth asteroid.

Where would be the most ideal landing site for the Artemis III crew in SpaceX’s Human Landing System (HLS)? This is what a recent study submitted to Acta Astronautica hopes to address as an international team of scientists investigated plausible landing sites within the lunar south pole region, which comes after NASA selected 13 candidate landing regions in August 2022 and holds the potential to enable new methods in determining landing sites for future missions, as well.

Few scientists doubt that Mars was once warm and wet. The evidence for a warm, watery past keeps accumulating, and even healthy skepticism can’t dismiss it. All this evidence begs the next question: what happened to it?

Understanding the star formation rate (SFR) in a galaxy is critical to understanding the galaxy itself. Some galaxies are starburst galaxies with extremely high SFRs, some are quenched or quiescent galaxies with very low SFRs, and some are in the middle. Researchers used the JWST to observe a pair of galaxies at Cosmic Noon that are just beginning to merge to see how SFRs vary in different regions of both galaxies.

The European Space Agency (ESA) launched its final Vega rocket this week, lofting a Sentinel-2C Earth observation satellite into orbit. This wraps up 12 years of service and 20 successful flights for the venerable Vega. The rocket launched several well-known missions, including LISA Pathfinder (2015), the Earth-observing satellites Proba-V (2013), and Aeolus (2018). ESA will now launch these types of payloads on the new Vega-C rocket, capable of launching heavier payloads at a lower price.

Jupiter’s moon, Ganymede, is a fascinating celestial body. Measuring 2,634 km (1,636 mi) in diameter, it is also the largest satellite in the Solar System and even larger than Mercury, which measures 2,440 km (1,516 mi) in diameter. Like Europa, it has an interior ocean and is one of the few bodies in the Solar System (other than the gas giants) with an intrinsic magnetic field. The presence of this field also means Ganymede experiences aurorae circling the regions around its northern and southern poles due to interaction with Jupiter’s magnetic field.

Those of you following the Advanced Composite Solar Sail System may have heard that its booms and sail are now deployed. It is receiving light pressure from the Sun to propel it through the Solar System. Like a test pilot in a new aircraft, NASA are now testing out just how it handles. Before deployment, the spacecraft was slowly tumbling and now the controllers will see if they can get it under control and under sail power. The reflectivity of the sail means its an easy spot in the night sky, just fire up the NASA app to find out where to look.

In the 17th century, astronomers Giovanni Domenica Cassini and Christian Huygens noted the presence of hazy white caps while studying the Martian polar regions. These findings confirmed that Mars had ice caps in both polar regions, similar to Earth. By the 18th century, astronomers began to notice how the size of these poles varied depending on where Mars was in its orbital cycle. Along with discovering that Mars’ axis was tilted like Earth’s, astronomers realized that Mars’ polar ice caps underwent seasonal changes, much like Earth’s.

Archaeology is the study of human prehistory, so it seems incongruous to use its methods to study how humans behave in space. But that’s what astronauts aboard the International Space Station are doing.

The Universe often puts on a good show for us down here on Earth but one of the best spectacles must be a meteor shower. We see them when particles, usually the remains of comets, fall through our atmosphere and cause the atmosphere to glow. We see them as a fast moving streak of light but a new paper has suggested that the meteor showers we see can explain the sizes of the particles that originally formed the comet from where they came. 

The discovery of dark oxygen at an abyssal plain on the ocean floor generated a lot of interest. Could this oxygen source support life in the ocean depths? And if it can, what does that mean for places like Enceladus and Europa?