Space News & Blog Articles

Searching for exomoons - moons the orbit around another planet - was one of the most exciting capabilities expected of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) when it launched in late 2021. So, after four years of operation, why hasn’t it found one yet? Turns out it’s really, really hard to find a moon around a planet light-years away. A new paper available in pre-print on arXiv from David Kipping of Columbia University (and Cool Worlds YouTube Channel fame) shows why. They used 60 hours of time on JWST’s NIRSpec instrument and weren't able to definitively confirm the existence of a possible exomoon.

What can water in Jupiter’s atmosphere teach scientists about the planet’s composition? This is what a recent study published in the *Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences* hopes to address as a team of scientists investigated the distribution of water with Jupiter’s atmosphere. This study has the potential to help scientists better understand Jupiter’s atmospheric dynamics, composition, and evolutionary history.

What steps can be taken to improve and enhance the lifetime of space solar cells? This is what a recent study published in Joule hopes to address as an international team of researchers investigated new methods for improving both the lifetime and performance of space solar cells from the harshness of space weather and radiation. This study has the potential to help scientists and engineers develop new space technologies, especially as several private companies and government organizations are extending their reach into space.

Chemical rockets have taken us to the Moon and back, but traveling to the stars demands something more powerful. Space X’s Starship can lift extraordinary masses to orbit and send payloads throughout the Solar System using its chemical rockets but it cannot fly to nearby stars at thirty percent of light speed and land. For missions beyond our local region of space, we need something fundamentally more energetic than chemical combustion, and physics offers or in other words, antimatter.

Picture an astronaut on the Moon in 2035, reaching for a crisp lettuce leaf grown in lunar soil simulant, gazing upon Earth which is visible through the window. It sounds like science fiction, but a global collaboration of scientists is making this vision increasingly tangible, developing the agricultural technologies that will sustain human exploration of the Moon and Mars.

Touch a metal door handle on a dry day and you might get a small static shock, an annoying but harmless release of built up electrical charge. Now imagine that same phenomenon happening constantly in the swirling dust devils that race across the Martian surface. A team of scientists have just detected these electric discharges on Mars for the first time.

Have scientists finally confirmed the existence of the first exomoon? This is what a recent study accepted for publication in *Astronomy & Astrophysics* hopes to address as a large international team of researchers investigated new methods for identifying an exomoon orbiting a gas giant exoplanet. This study has the potential to help scientists develop new methods for finding exomoons, the latter of which has yet to be confirmed.