Space News & Blog Articles

Jupiter and Saturn, the two largest planets in the Solar System, are known for their large and varied systems of moons. At present count, Jupiter has more than 100 moons, while Saturn has more than double that, with over 280 known satellites. However, Jupiter's system of satellites includes four large moons - Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto - and this system contains the largest moon in the Solar System (Ganymede). Meanwhile, Saturn's system of satellites is dominated by one large moon (Titan), the second largest in the Solar System.

The nebular hypothesis states that stars and the planets that orbit them form from the same reservoir of material, called a solar nebula. It's the most commonly accepted explanation for how solar systems form. But despite its ability to explain many things about solar system formation, there are some outstanding questions.

Space is getting crowded - and not just with satellites, but with the massive amounts of data they’re generating. The amount of information being generated and passed through orbit is exploding. From high-resolution Earth observation images to global maritime monitoring, it’s also become a critical link in our infrastructure. But there’s another space this growing crowd of satellites is dependent on that is also filling up fast - the radio frequency spectrum. If we want to keep expanding our orbital infrastructure, we need to rethink how we move data around. On March 30, 2026, the European Space Agency (ESA) supported a series of eight CubeSats and one specialized payload on SpaceX’s Transporter-16 rideshare mission with the overarching goals of testing high-throughput laser communication, inter-satellite networking, and in-orbit artificial intelligence processing to make space data transfer faster, more secure, and vastly more efficient.

NASA's Artemis II mission has completed its pass of the far side of the Moon, establishing a new distance record for a crewed spaceflight, over 400,000 km (250,000 mi) from Earth. And in the process, its four-person crew is capturing images of lunar regions no human has ever seen! Fortunately for the rest of us, they are beaming these images home and providing a treasure trove of scientific data in the process. The images, released on Tuesday, were captured by the crew on April 6th during their seven-hour flyby of the far side of the Moon.

Despite all we've learned about star formation, the process is still riven with mystery. Our prying telescopic eyes struggle to pierce the thick gaseous regions that give birth to stars. Progress has been steady, though, and we can thank the Atacama Large Millimeter/sub-millimeter Array (ALMA) for some of it.

Reading the Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson brings the benefits and pitfalls of efforts to terraform the Red Planet into sharp relief. Since the 1970s, when Carl Sagan first suggested the possibility that we could make Mars more Earth-like, that process has been a staple of science fiction. But there’s always been a significant amount of humanity that thinks we shouldn’t. A new paper available in pre-print on arXiv from Edwin Kite of the University of Chicago and his co-authors skirts around the ethical and moral questions of whether we should and tries to take a long hard look at whether we can.

(This is Part 2 of a series on neutrinos, Majorana fermions, and one of the strangest open questions in physics. Read Part 1 first.)

On August 19, 2022, solar astronomers using the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) on the Hawaiian island of Maui caught the fading remnants of a C-class solar flare. Their observations showed something unusual: very strong spectral fingerprints of calcium II H and hydrogen-epsilon lines. It was the first time these two light signatures were seen in great detail during the decline of a solar flare. According to computer models, those lines were stronger than expected and play a not well-understood role in how flares heat the solar atmosphere where they occur. The same models can be used to study flares in other stars, as well.

The James Webb Space Telescope's (JWST) picture of the month shows Tau 042021 (left) and Oph 163131 (right), two protoplanetary disks located about 450 and 480 light-years from Earth in the constellations Taurus and Ophiuchus (respectively). These disks are composed of material left over from the formation of new stars, which coalesce into planetesimals that can eventually form a planetary system. The gas that remains is blown away by solar radiation while smaller objects (asteroids and iceteroids) settle into belts or follow the orbit of planets.

Scientists at the University of Minnesota College of Science and Engineering have reached a milestone with the Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (SuperCDMS) experiment. Located deep underground at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory Laboratory (SNOLAB) in Canada, the world's deepest underground laboratory, this experiment is designed to detect the Universe's unseen mass, aka. Dark Matter. The SuperCDMS team recently announced that they had successfully cooled the experiment to its operational temperature, hundreds of times colder than outer space.

Japan’s space agency, JAXA, has been knocking it out of the park with small-body exploration missions for decades. They had historic successes with both Hayabusa and Hayabusa2, and they are going to visit the Martian Moons soon with the Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission. But after that, they are aiming for something much more pristine and arguably more difficult - a comet. The Next Generation Small-Body Return (NGSR) was recently described in a paper at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC), and is under assessment as a large-class mission for the 2030s.

The water locked up in the Permanently Shadowed Regions (PSRs) of the Moon’s south pole is a critical resource if we are ever going to get a permanent lunar presence off the ground. But while we know the water ice there exists, we don’t really know how much. We have to move from general estimates to mineable-scale prospecting data. That is what Oasis-1, the newly proposed lunar prospecting mission from Blue Origin that was recently introduced at the 2026 Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) is meant to do.

On April 1st, 2026, the Artemis II mission launched from Earth, carrying its four-person crew on a journey that will take them around the Moon. Since then, mission control has performed the Trans-Lunar Injection (TLI), while the crew has been performing proximity operations, testing flight instruments, and troubleshooting the Orion's systems (including the zero-g toilet). They've also taken the time to snap some candid photos of Earth to show how far they've traveled.

The theory of Panspermia holds that life is spread through the cosmos via asteroids, comets, and other objects. When the building blocks of life emerge on one planet, impacts can eject surface material into space, which then carries these seeds to other worlds. For decades, scientists have debated whether this could have occurred between Earth and Mars (in both directions). However, the recent controversy over the possible existence of microbial life in Venus' dense clouds has sparked discussions of interplanetary transfers between Venus, Earth, and Mars.

In Dante's "Divine Comedy," Hell is described as an "Inferno" with nine concentric circles, the entrance of which has a sign that reads "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here."For the planets of the Solar System, Venus is about as close to this description as one can get. On the surface, temperatures are hot enough to melt lead (464 °C; 872 °F), while the atmosphere is dense enough to crush a human skull (over 90 times Earth's atmospheric density). However, above the cloud deck, roughly 47-70 km (29–43 mi) above the surface, temperatures are stable, and the atmospheric pressure is roughly equivalent to Earth's.

We’re getting closer and closer to finding a real Earth-like exoplanet. But finding one is only half the battle. To truly know if we’re looking at an Earth analog somewhere else in the galaxy, we have to directly image it too. That’s a job for the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO), a planned space-based telescope whose primary job is to do precisely that. But even capturing a picture and a planet and getting spectral readings of its atmospheric chemistry still isn’t enough, according to a new paper available in pre-print on arXiv by Kaz Gary of Ohio State and their co-authors. HWO will need to figure out how much a planet weighs first.

As our powerful infrared telescopes allow astronomers to peer further and further back in time, they've discovered some puzzling things. One of them concerns supermassive black holes (SMBH), the physics-challenging behemoths at the center of large galaxies like the Milky Way. As it turns out, SMBH grew much more rapidly at high redshifts than they do in the contemporary Universe.

For some time, astronomers have theorized that there is a connection between planetary mass and rotation. In the Solar System, Jupiter and Saturn both rotate rapidly, completing a rotation in roughly ten hours, while accounting for a significant fraction of the Solar System's rotational energy. Using the W.M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea, Hawai'i, a team of astronomers tested this predicted relationship by studying 32 gas giants and brown dwarfs in distant star systems - 6 giant planets larger than Jupiter and 25 brown dwarf companions

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are making a growing contribution to astronomy. As powerful telescopes and large automated surveys become more commonplace, the vast quantities of data they generate demand equally powerful diagnostic tools. The Vera Rubin Observatory and its enormous data-generating capacity drive the point home. The observatory's Legacy Survey of Time and Space generates up to 20 terabytes of data each night, and that data is processed at a dedicated facility.

The planet Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun, and also the most difficult for spacecraft to visit and explore. This is because as spacecraft get closer to Mercury, the Sun’s enormous gravity pulls in the spacecraft, greatly increasing its speed and making it hard to slow down without large amounts of fuel. But what if a spacecraft could both travel to and explore Mercury without fuel? This could drastically reduce mission costs while delivering impactful science.

The planet Venus is often called “Earth’s twin” due to the similar sizes, but the reality couldn’t be farther from the truth. Unlike Earth, which is hospitable to an estimated billions of lifeforms, Venus is not hospitable to life as we know it, at least on its surface. This is because the surface of Venus not only experiences an average temperature of 464 degrees Celsius (867 degrees Fahrenheit), but it also has crushing pressures approximately 92 times of Earth, or equivalent to approximately 1 kilometer (3,000 feet) below the ocean. These extreme surface conditions are why the longest spacecraft to survive on the Venusian surface is just over two hours.