Space News & Blog Articles

In the summer of 2023, something happened that engineers had talked about for decades but few genuinely expected to see in their lifetimes. SpaceX's Starship, a stainless steel tower taller than a thirty storey building lit its thirty three engines simultaneously and lifted off from the Texas coast. It did not go entirely to plan. But it went. And when the Super Heavy booster returned in flight test five to be caught, mid air, by the enormous mechanical arms of its own launch tower, it was clear that the rules of spaceflight had fundamentally changed.

Something arrived in our Solar System last summer that had been travelling for longer than the Earth has existed. It came from somewhere out there in the dark between the stars, possibly from a planetary system that formed billions of years before our own Sun even ignited. We don't know exactly where it came from. We may never know. But for a brief, extraordinary window of time, this ancient wanderer passed close enough to study, and the world's astronomers dropped almost everything to watch.

You could fit about a dozen of them across the full stop at the end of this sentence. Under a microscope they look like tiny eight legged bears shuffling around in slow motion. They have been frozen, boiled, irradiated, sent into the vacuum of open space and brought back alive. Scientists have been studying them for over two hundred years and they still have the capacity to astonish. Their name is tardigrade, though most people know them by the rather more charming nickname of water bears. And right now, they might be one of our best tools for figuring out how to survive on Mars.

Through the Artemis Program, NASA hopes to establish a permanent human presence on the Moon in its southern polar region. China, Russia, and the European Space Agency (ESA) have similar plans, all of which involve building bases near the permanently shadowed regions (PSRs) - i.e., craters that contain water ice - that dot the South Pole-Aitken Basin. For these and other agencies, it is vital that these bases be as self-sufficient as possible since resupply missions cannot be launched regularly and take several days to arrive.

When the Apollo astronauts returned from the Moon, they brought back something more valuable than any treasure, 382 kilograms of Moon rock that would keep scientists busy for generations. For decades those samples have been scrutinised, measured, and debated and, for decades one question has refused to be satisfactorily answered… Did the Moon once have a powerful magnetic field or was it always magnetically feeble?

It is one of the most famous questions in science, and it was asked, as legend has it, over lunch. Enrico Fermi, the physicist who helped build the first nuclear reactor and whose name graces a unit of length so small it makes an atom look generous, was chatting with colleagues about the possibility of alien life when he suddenly asked ‘where is everybody?’

Aging stars are prolific producers of dust, and the dust plays an important role in the cosmos. Their dust is ejected into the interstellar medium (ISM) where it is taken up in the next generation of stars and planets. This is how stars seed their environments with metals, elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, which are necessary for rocky planets and life to form.

Satellite imaging is increasingly important to every field from crop monitoring to poverty reduction. So it’s no surprise that there have been more and more satellites launched to try to meet that growing demand. But with more satellites comes more risk for collision - and the debris field that comes after the collision. A new paper in Advanced in Space Research from John Mackintosh and his co-authors at the University of Manchester looks at how we might use mission design to mitigate some of the hazards of increasing the number of satellites even more.

Superliminous supernovae are miraculous events. For astronomers, they also provide a vital tool for measuring cosmic distances and the rate at which the Universe is expanding. As part of the Cosmic Distance Ladder, these incredibly bright stellar explosions are the "standard candles" for objects billions of light-years away. In a rare event, researchers from the University of Munich, using the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) in Arizona, witnessed a superluminous supernova 10 billion light-years away that was far brighter than most explosions of its kind.

Estimating a mass for a potentially hazardous asteroid (PHA) is perhaps the single most important thing to understand about it, after its trajectory. Actually doing so isn’t easy though, as the mass for objects in the tens to hundreds of kilometers in size are too small to have their mass calculated by traditional radio-frequency tracking techniques. A new paper from Justin Atchison of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and his co-authors proposes a method that could find the mass of asteroids even on the smaller end of that range, but will require precise coordination.

The Sun is trying to tell us something. In the first four days of February this year, it unleashed six powerful X-class solar flares in rapid succession including one classified X8.1, the strongest in several years. For most of us, that meant some disrupted radio signals, some spectacular aurora displays, and a reminder that our nearest star is not the steady, reliable lamp we sometimes take for granted. For solar physicists, it was confirmation that we are deep inside one of the most dangerous periods the Sun has produced in a generation.

If humans are ever going to live and work in space, it is paramount that we can meet our basic needs far from home. This includes food and water, but the most vital element is a steady supply of clean air to breathe. This is especially important for long-duration missions to the Moon, Mars, and other deep space destinations. For any astronauts or inhabitants this far from Earth, opportunities for resupply missions are few and far between. To this end, NASA and other space agencies are looking to In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) as the solution.

Don’t miss the only total lunar eclipse of 2026, this coming Tuesday.

No two snowflakes are the same, and neither are nebulae. The NASA/ESA/CSA JWST showed how undeniable that statement is when it imaged PMR 1, also known as the Exposed Cranium Nebula (ECN). The glowing cloud of gas and dust bears an eerie resemblance to a cosmic x-ray of a human skull, complete with a double-hemisphere arrangement of grey matter.

The Solar System's icy moons are a focal point in our search for habitability and life. Among them are Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto, all Galilean moons of Jupiter. Their environmental conditions play a big role in potential habitability, but so does chemistry. Without the right molecular building blocks, life can't get started.

The *New Horizons* mission made history on Jan. 1st, 2019, when it became the first spacecraft to conduct a close flyby with Arrokoth, a Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) beyond the orbit of Pluto. The images it captured of this object, revealing a snowman-shaped profile, surprised and perplexed astronomers. Since then, astronomers have debated how such objects could form in the outer reaches of the Solar System. And now, researchers at Michigan State University (MSU) believe they have found the answer, and it's really quite simple: gravitational collapse.

When the venerable Hubble Space Telescope made its Deep Fields studies of the early Universe, it discovered something that would puzzle astronomers to this day. When the Universe was just a few billion years old, it was already populated by several large galaxies. This mystery only deepened with the deployment of the James Webb Space Telescope, which observed an abundance of bright galaxies that existed even sooner. For astronomers, this begged the question of how such massive and evolved galaxies could exist shortly after the Big Bang.

March is the time to catch the encore performance for comet E1 Wierzchos crossing the evening sky.

Thinking about food systems in deep space likely brings to mind something like the Martian where an astronaut is scratching barely enough food to survive out of potatoes grown in Martian regolith. Or perhaps a fancy hydroponic system on an interplanetary transport ship, with artificial lighting and all the associated technological wizardry. But a new paper published in Acta Astronautica by Tor Blomqvist and Ralph Fritsche points out that growing food is only one small part of the whole cycle of providing sustenance for astronauts in space. To really get a sense of how difficult it will be, we have to look at the whole picture.

In this age of Mars rovers, questions about the planet's ancient past have shifted. A growing body of evidence supports the idea that Mars was once warm and wet. Now researchers are focused on the timeline of the red planet's watery past. Research efforts all come down to the ultimate question regarding the planet: Did it ever host life?

Young stars are known for their powerful radiation and strong winds. They can shape their gaseous surroundings, both promoting and inhibiting other stars from forming, depending on the circumstances. Their strong winds also have another effect: the stars inflate gaseous bubbles around themselves.