A new study has reviewed how space habitat designs have evolved from inflatable bubbles to 3D-printed structures built from Martian dust. The research traces how engineers have wrestled with extreme temperatures, the bombmardment of radiation, and the challenge of building on worlds without breathable air, transforming each obstacle into solved problems with innovative ideas and designs that could soon house the first permanent residents of the Moon and Mars.
Asteroids spin. Most of them do so rather slowly, and up until now most theories of asteroid rotation have failed to explain exactly why. A new paper from Wen-Han Zhou at the University of Tokyo and his co-authors might finally be able to fully explain that mystery as well as a few others related to asteroid rotation. Their work was presented at the Joint Meeting of the Europlanet Science Congress and the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Science in late September and could impact our understanding of how best to defend against a potentially hazardous asteroid.
Low Earth orbit might seem like empty space, but for the thousands of satellites circling our planet between 95 and 1,900 km up, it's actually a surprisingly hostile environment. Every moment, these spacecraft are bombarded by highly reactive oxygen atoms that corrode their surfaces, while collisions with atmospheric molecules create drag that gradually pulls them back toward Earth. Most satellites last only about five years before these relentless forces take their toll, and the spacecraft tumbles back through the atmosphere. Now, a team at the University of Texas in Dallas is developing a protective coating that could fundamentally change how long satellites survive in orbit.
Driving on the Moon for the first time has got to be an exhilarating experience. But driving the same path on the Moon for the 500th time probably won’t be nearly as exciting to whatever poor astronaut got stuck with that duty for the day. With that in mind, a team of researchers led by PhD student Alec Krawciw and Professor Tim Barfoot of the University of Toronto are working on a way to automate the mundane task of driving goods back and forth from a lunar landing site to a nascent lunar exploration base.
Citing delays, acting NASA chief Sean Duffy announced that the Artemis Program - NASA's plan to return astronauts to the Moon - needs to be shaken up again. The announcement came on Monday (Oct. 22nd) when Duffy, also the Secretary of Transportation, made two television appearances to discuss ongoing problems with the program. This included the development of the Starship Human Landing System (HLS), the lunar lander that will transport astronauts to and from the lunar surface, which NASA contracted to SpaceX in 2021.
On the surface of it, Earth and Saturn's moon Titan are wildly different from one another. Earth is temperate and warmed by the Sun, liquid water flows across its surface, and life pervades its opulent biosphere. Titan is beyond the reach of the Sun's warmth, is frigid and lifeless, and orbits a gas giant that is also lifeless.
In the distant past, the Solar System was rife with impacts and collisions. Millions of rocky objects zoomed chaotically through the system, smashing into each other in collisional cascades. Over time, many of them eventually became part of the rocky planets. What's left of the space rocks are mostly gathered in the main asteroid belt.
Astronomers with the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) made history in 2019 by producing the first image of a black hole. The object in question was the supermassive black hole (SMBH) at the center of M87, a supergiant elliptical galaxy about 53.5 million light-years distant in the constellation Virgo. This was followed in 2022 with the first-ever image of Sagittarius A*, the SMBH at the heart of the Milky Way galaxy. Now, in another first, astronomers have observed a pair of black holes orbiting each other in quasar OJ287, an Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN) located 4 billion light-years away in the constellation Cancer.
The Search For Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is evolving. We’ve moved on from the limited thinking of monitoring radio waves to checking for interstellar pushing lasers or even budding Dyson swarms around stars. To match our increased understanding of the ways we might find intelligence elsewhere in the galaxy, the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) is working through an update to its protocols for what researchers should do after a confirmed detection of intelligence outside of Earth. Their new suggestions are available in a pre-print paper on arXiv, but were also voted on at the 2025 International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Sydney, with potential full adoption early next year.
The wavelengths of radio light are so large that you can't capture a high-resolution image with a single dish. To capture an image as sharp as, say, the Hubble telescope, you'd need a radio dish tens of kilometers across. So radio astronomers took a different approach. They used an array of dozens of antennas, each capturing their own signal. Since the antennas not only capture precise data but also the precise timing of that data, astronomers can use a process known as interferometry. Light from a distant radio object reaches each antenna at a slightly different time, and by correlating the arrival times, astronomers can treat the array as a virtual antenna disk the size of the entire array. From many, one, as the saying goes.
Dust devils are a regular occurrence on Mars. Similar to Earth, these short-lived whirlwinds emerge when surface heating occurs, causing changes in air pressure and a vertical column of wind to form. As the column pulls in surrounding air, it becomes a vortex that kicks up dust, which it carries with it across the surface. While Mars has a very thin atmosphere, less than 1% that of Earth's, the lower gravity means that its dust devils grow larger than anything we see here. And according to new research by an international research team, these dust devils will reach velocities that are higher than what we expected.
Earth has a long, 4.5 billion history full of momentous twists and turns. Multiple prominent events played leading roles in Earth's story. One of them is the catastrophic impact with another planetesimal early in Earth's history that not only created the Moon, but altered Earth's chemistry forever.
All sorts of crazy things have been suggested regarding 3I/ATLAS, the third known interstellar object that we’ve discovered. Some are simply conspiracy theories about it being an alien spacecraft, while others have been well-thought out suggestions, like using Martian-based probes to observe the comet as it streaked past the red planet. A new paper pre-published on arXiv and accepted for publication by the Research Notes of the American Astronomical Society by Samuel Grand and Geraint Jones, of the Finnish Meteorological Institute and ESA respectively, falls into the latter category, and suggests utilizing two spacecraft already en route to their separate destinations to potentially detect ions from the object’s spectacular tail that has formed as it approaches the Sun.
In 2008, NASA's Phoenix Lander generated headlines when its thruster exposed subsurface water ice under its landing spot. It then used its robotic arm to dig beneath the surface, where it exposed more ice. Orbiters like Mars Express and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter added additional evidence for subsurface ice with radar and imaging. Now, scientists think that the planet may hold vast amounts of water ice under its surface, enough to potentially cover the entire surface of Mars with 1.5 meters of liquid water.
When the Apollo astronauts explored the Moon from 1969 to 1972, they left behind several science experiments designed to measure the Moon's magnetic field, seismic activity, and environment. Each mission also returned with samples of rock and soil (regolith), the analysis of which revealed a wealth of information about the Moon's composition. For instance, the rocks showed that the Earth and Moon had similar structures and compositions, leading to the widely accepted theory that the Moon formed 4.5 billion years ago when a Mars-sized object (Theia) impacted primordial Earth (known as the Giant Impact Hypothesis).
Is anybody out there? Probably. Most stars have planets; we've discovered more than 6,000 exoplanets thus far, and the most basic statistics point toward the existence of countless potentially habitable worlds in the Universe. But when we have looked for any scrap of evidence for alien civilizations, we have found nothing so far. The question is why?
The ice giants remain some of the most interesting places to explore in the solar system. Uranus in particular has drawn a lot of interest lately, especially after the 2022 Decadal Survey from the National Academies named it as the highest priority destination. But as of now, we still don’t have a fully fleshed out and planned mission ready to go for the multiple launch windows in the 2030s. That might actually be an advantage, though, as a new system coming online might change the overall mission design fundamentally. Starship recently continued its recent string of successful tests, and a new paper presented at the IEEE Aerospace Conference by researchers at MIT looked at how this new, much more capable launch system, could impact the development of the Uranus Orbiter and Probe (UOP) that the Decadal Survey suggested.
At the dawn of time, so the theory goes, the cosmos underwent a flash of rapid expansion. Almost instantly the visible Universe grew from a volume smaller than a proton to a spherical region nearly two meters across. It's a moment known as early cosmic inflation. Although Inflation solves several cosmic problems, such as the homogeneity of the Universe and the ratio of hydrogen to helium we observe, we haven't been able to prove it. But we might be able to prove it by looking for a particular type of gravitational wave.
On the surface of Mars, there are numerous features that tell of a past age when the planet was warmer and wetter, with rivers, lakes, and even an ocean that covered much of its northern hemisphere. These include river channels, delta fans, sedimentary deposits, and low-lying regions rich in clay minerals. The discovery and study of these features over the past fifty years have raised some pressing questions for scientists. These include the question of how much water once flowed on Mars and what led to the gradual transition that left the planet a frigid, desiccated world, where the only water on the surface comes in the form of ice and permafrost.
What can cryovolcanism on Pluto teach scientists about the dwarf planet’s current geological activity? This is what a recent study published in *The Planetary Science Journal* hopes to address as a team of researchers investigated potential cryovolcanic sites within specific regions on Pluto. This study has the potential to help scientists better understand the current geological activity, including how it can be active while orbiting so far from the Sun.
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