Space News & Blog Articles

Solar system worlds beyond Earth have amazing surface features. Thanks to planetary science missions, we see images of canyons, craters, and cliffs across a variety of worlds. Someday, those places will give mountain climbers and hikers new challenges. In particular, Mars will be a favored destination. Future hikers and mountain climbers will be spoiled for choice, even if they must wear space suits to get their thrill on.

“We’re coming up on the plumes!” The co-pilot announced over the intercom.

NASA’s Institute for Advanced Concepts is famous for supporting outlandish ideas in the astronomy and space exploration fields. Since being re-established in 2011, the institute has supported a wide variety of projects as part of its three-phase program. However, so far, only three projects have gone on to receive Phase III funding. And one of those just released a white paper describing a mission to get a telescope that could effectively see biosignatures on nearby exoplanets by utilizing the gravitational lens of our own Sun.

Lasers are useful for a lot of things. They made CDs work (when they were still a thing). They also provide hours of entertainment for cats (and their humans). But they can also create magnetic conditions similar to the surface of the Sun in a lab, according to new research by scientists at Osaka University. And that might help a wide range of other scientific disciplines, ranging from solar astronomy to fusion.

Lunar exploration has been gaining more and more traction from various sources recently. Every step forward is another towards potentially having a permanent human presence on another solar system body. ESA took another step recently with the completion of its Analog-1 robotics test, which took place successfully on the slopes of Mt Etna earlier this month.

In 2026, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (RST) – aka. the “Mother of Hubble” – will take to space and begin addressing some of the deepest mysteries of the Universe. This will include capturing the deepest field images of the cosmos, refining measurements of the Hubble Constant (aka. Hubble’s Law), and determining the role of Dark Matter and Dark Energy in the evolution of the cosmos. Alongside its next-generation partner, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the RST will acquire infrared images with over 200 times the surveying power of its predecessor with the same rich level of detail.

Now that the James Webb Space Telescope is operational, astronomers can study some of the most faint and distant galaxies ever seen. By some accounts, we may have already captured the image of a galaxy from when the universe was just 300 million years old. But we can’t be entirely sure of its distance, and that is a big problem for astronomers.

SLS finally gets a launch date for Artemis I, JWST keeps giving the goodness, Percy finds another weird thing on Mars, astronomers find a dormant black hole and NASA will launch a flagship telescope on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy.