NASA is facing increasingly sharp challenges as it pursues its goal of landing astronauts on the moon again before this decade is out — and as the space agency braces for another leadership change, it’s clear that the year ahead will also bring further challenges. How will NASA fare?
Carl Sagan, along with co-author Edwin Salpeter, famously published a paper in the 70s about the possibility of finding life in the cloud of Jupiter. They specifically described “sinkers, floaters, and hunters” that could live floating and moving in the atmosphere of our solar system’s largest planet. He also famously talked about how clouds on another of our solar system’s planets - Venus - obfuscated what was on the surface, leading to wild speculation about a lush, Jurassic Park-like world full of life, just obscured by clouds. Venus turned out to be the exact opposite of that, but both of those papers show the impact clouds can have on the Earth for life. A new paper by authors as the Carl Sagan Institute, led by Ligia Coelho of Cornell, argues that we should look at clouds as potential habitats for life - we just have to know how to look for it.
Measuring the Solar System's velocity through space sounds straightforward, but it represents one of the most challenging tests of our cosmological understanding. As our Solar System travels through the universe, this motion creates a subtle asymmetry, a "headwind" where slightly more distant galaxies appear in our direction of travel than behind us. The effect is extraordinarily faint and requires sensitive measurements to detect.
The Pleiades ranks among humanity's most culturally significant celestial object, appearing in the Old Testament, celebrated as Matariki in New Zealand, and even inspiring Subaru's corporate logo. But astronomers have long suspected this tight cluster of bright stars represents only a fragment of something larger. The challenge lay in proving it.
Yesterday, on Nov. 14th, 2025, the crew of Shenzhou-20 has returned to Earth from China's Tiangong space station after a week's delay. The delay was imposed by damage inflicted on their spacecraft, allegedly caused by an impact with space debris. This impact cracked the window aboard the Shenzhou-20 spacecraft, forcing the crew to depart the station using the newly arrived Shenzhou-21 spacecraft. The three-person crew, consisting of Chen Dong, Chen Zhongrui, and Wang Jie, was originally scheduled to return to Earth on Nov. 5th.
Most people interested in space exploration already know lunar dust is an absolute nightmare to deal with. We’re already reported on numerous potential methods for dealing with it, from 3D printing landing pads so we don’t sand blast everything in a given area when a rocket lands, to using liquid nitrogen to push the dust off of clothing. But the fact remains that, for any long-term presence on the Moon, dealing with the dust that resides there is one of the most critical tasks. A new paper from Dr. Slava Turyshev of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who is enough of a polymath that our last article about his research was covering a telescope at the solar gravitational lens, updates our understanding of the physical properties of lunar dust, providing more accurate information that engineers can use to design the next round of rovers and infrastructure to support human expansion to our nearest neighbor.
Keep an eye on the sky early Monday morning for the Leonid meteors, and a possible second auroral storm.
Conventional wisdom has it that stars keep their spherical shape because of the careful balance between gravitational pressure and the internal pressure caused by the nuclear fusion happening in their cores. When they run out of nuclear fuel, they undergo gravitational collapse at their core while the outer shell falls inward and rebounds. For particularly massive stars, this triggers a massive explosion (a supernova) that blows off the outer layers of the star, dispersing material into space and filling the interstellar medium (ISM).
In March of 2024 the DESI collaboration dropped a bombshell on the cosmological community: slim but significant evidence that dark energy might be getting weaker with time. This was a stunning result delivered after years of painstaking analysis. It’s not a bullet-proof result, but it doesn’t have to be to make our lives more interesting.
At this point in history, astronomers and engineers who grew up watching Deep Impact and Armageddon, two movies about the destructive power of asteroid impacts, are likely in relatively high ranking positions at space agencies. Don’t Look Up also provided a more modern, though more pessimistic (or, unfortunately, realistic?), look at what might potentially happen if a “killer” asteroid is found on approach to Earth. So far, life hasn’t imitated art when it comes to potentially one of the most catastrophic events in human history, but most space enthusiasts agree that it's worth preparing for when it will. A new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv, from Maxime Devogèle of ESA’s Near Earth Object (NEO) Coordination Centre and his colleagues analyzes a dry run that happened around a year ago with the discovery of asteroid 2024 YR4.
While the Universe may appear serene and inspiring at first glance, it is actually filled with particles traveling at nearly the speed of light that possess immense energy. These consist primarily of atomic nuclei and subatomic particles, such as protons, electrons, and neutrinos, which constantly bombard Earth. The origin of these particles remains one of the longest-standing mysteries in modern astrophysics. A leading theory is that they are created by extreme events, such as supernovae and tidal disruption events (TDEs), which occur when stars are ripped apart by black holes.
Getting time on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is the dream of many astronomers. The most powerful space telescope currently in our arsenal, the JWST has been in operation for almost four years at this point, after a long and tumultuous development time. Now, going into its fifth year of operation, the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), the organization that operates the science and mission operations centers for the JWST has received its highest number ever of submission for observational programs. Now a team of volunteer judges and the institute's scientists just have to pick which ones will actually get telescope time.
At a young age, we're told how the Sun warms the Earth and makes life possible. That idea sticks with most of us for life. But when we want to understand things more thoroughly and we dig more deeply, we learn that Earth its own heat sources that help it maintian habitability: remnant heat and radioactive decay. Other rocky worlds can have these sources, too.
October and November 2024 proved to be particularly productive for gravitational wave astronomy. Within the two months, the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration detected two black hole mergers with such unusual properties that they're changing our understanding of how they form and evolve. Both events feature rapidly spinning black holes in unequal mass pairs, properties that point toward a violent history of previous collisions rather than a quiet stellar origin.
Long before humans reached orbit, insects had already proven they could handle spaceflight. Fruit flies travelled aboard a V-2 rocket in 1947, becoming the first animals to reach space and survive the journey. Since then, countless creepy crawlies have followed, from bumblebees and houseflies to ants and stick insects, helping scientists understand how living organisms cope with the extreme environment beyond Earth's atmosphere.
As stars age, they expand. That’s bad news for planets orbiting close to their stars, according to a new study published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society this month. The study suggests that planets closest to their stars, especially those that orbit their stars in just 12 days or less, are at a higher risk of being sent to their doom by their aging suns.
For decades, astronauts traveling to space were forced to subsist on a diet that largely consisted of freeze-dried and packaged food. This changed with the introduction of plant-growing operations in orbit, like the Vegetable Production System (Veggie) aboard the International Space Station (ISS). But in what is a really big first, the China National Space Agency (CNSA) has installed a new in-orbit barbecue system aboard the Tiangong space station. In a recent video (shown below) released by the China Central Television (CCTV), we see the current crew of the Tiangong giving the BBQ a whirl!
Weather forecasting is notoriously wonky - climate modeling even more so. But their slowing increasing ability to predict what the natural world will throw at us humans is largely thanks to two things - better models and increased computing power. Now, a new paper from researchers led by Daniel Klocke of the Max Planck Institute in Germany, and available in pre-print form on arXiv, describes what some in the climate modeling community have described as the “holy grail” of their field - an almost kilometer-scale resolution model that combines weather forecasting with climate modeling.
The Sun produces more power than 100 trillion times humanity's entire electricity generation. In orbit, solar panels can be eight times more productive than their Earth bound counterparts, generating energy almost continuously without the need for heavy battery storage. These facts have led a team of Google researchers to ask what if the best place to scale artificial intelligence isn't on Earth at all, but in space?
The Moon has no atmosphere, no weather, and no wind. Yet it faces an invisible bombardment more relentless than any terrestrial storm, a constant rain of micrometeoroids, tiny fragments of rock and metal travelling at speeds up to 70 kilometres per second. As NASA's Artemis program prepares to establish a permanent lunar base, understanding this silent threat has become critical to keeping future astronauts safe.
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