Space News & Blog Articles

In-situ resource utilization is a hot topic these days in space exploration circles, and scientists and engineers have had a great advantage of getting access to new materials from bodies on the solar system that either have never been seen before, such as asteroids or haven’t been visited in decades, such as the moon. Recently, China’s Chang’e 5 brought back the first sample of lunar regolith to Earth in almost 50 years. Using part of that sample, researchers from several Chinese universities have developed an automated system to create rocket fuel and oxygen out of CO2, using the lunar regolith as a catalyst.

There are plenty of exciting places in the solar system to explore. But few are more interesting than Saturn’s moon Enceladus. It’s one of the only planetary bodies known to have all six necessary components of Earth-based life. It has an active ocean and most likely hydrothermal vents, similar to those on Earth, where some species exist entirely separately from any solar-powered biosphere. All of this makes it one of the most likely candidates for life in the solar system – and the center of much astrobiological attention. Now a team from a variety of European countries and the US has proposed a mission to the moon that could profoundly impact our understanding of our place in the universe – if the European Space Agency (ESA) funds it.

Solar sailing seems like a simple concept – instead of being pushed along by the wind, as in a typical sailing ship, a spacecraft can use highly reflective said to be pushed along simply by sunlight. But as with almost all engineering challenges, that technique is much easier said than done. Sunlight can head up one side of a sail more than another, causing the ship to rotate unexpectedly. Other unforeseen situations could arise that can also have catastrophic consequences for any mission using this propulsion technology. Luckily, there is a way to account for those situations, though it involves a lot of math. Control theory is common in system design, and now researchers at Beihang University have devised a control scheme that they think could help minimize the risk to solar sails.

There’s no question that light pollution is a growing problem. Thankfully many scientists and advocates are working for change. And you can be a part of that change with a simple app that you can download to catalog the street lights in your neighborhood.

Scientists have long suspected that Mars was once warm and wet in its ancient past. The Mars Ocean Hypothesis says that the planet was home to a large ocean around 4 billion years ago. The ocean filled the Vastitas Borealis basin in the planet’s northern hemisphere. The basin is 4–5 km (2.5–3 miles) below Mars’ mean elevation.

Fifty years ago, NASA and the Soviet space program conducted the first sample-return missions from the Moon. This included lunar rocks brought back to Earth by the Apollo astronauts and those obtained by robotic missions that were part of the Soviet Luna Program. The analysis of these rocks revealed a great deal about the Moon’s composition, formation, and geological history. In particular, scientists concluded that the rocks were formed from volcanic eruptions more than three billion years ago.