Space News & Blog Articles

As missions like Kepler and TESS discovered more rocky exoplanets in recent years, scientists looked forward to the launch of the JWST. The powerful space telescope has the ability gather infrared spectra of exoplanet atmospheres, a key need in understanding the planets being discovered. It was hoped that these atmospheric characterizations would advance our understanding of habitability.

Neil Armstrong almost made a mistake. He had found an interesting rock sticking out of a formation. Curious to see what the rock was made of, he needed to examine its interior more closely. So he reached for his hammer and took a swing. The rock was far more brittle than he anticipated, and instead of cleaving in two it shattered. One of those shards flew away with so much force that it left behind a bloody gash in this forearm.

The JWST has another feather in its cap. The perceptive space telescope has taken a break from peering into the ancient, distant Universe and probing the formation and evolution of galaxies. It's turned its gaze closer to home, examining Uranus for the presence of undiscovered moons, and it found one.

Earth’s atmosphere is large, extending out to around 10,000 km from the surface of the planet. It’s so large, in fact, that scientists break it into five separate sections, and there’s one particular section that hasn’t got a whole lot of attention due to the difficulty in maintaining any craft there. Planes and balloons can visit the troposphere and stratosphere, the two sections closest to the ground, while satellites can sit in orbit in the thermosphere and exosphere, allowing for a platform for consistent observations. But the mesosphere, the line section in the middle, is too close to have a stable orbit, but too sparse in air for traditional airplanes or balloons to work. As a result, we don’t have a lot of data on it, but it impacts climate and weather forecasting, so scientists have simply had to make a lot of assumptions about what it's like up there. But a new study from researchers at Harvard and the University of Chicago might have found a way to put stable sensing platforms into the mesosphere, using a novel flight mechanism known as photophoresis.

NASA's Psyche Mission launched in October 2023 to rendezvous with the asteroid of the same name. The Psyche asteroid is a metal-rich asteroid that could be the remnant core of a planetesimal that had its outer layers stripped away. It's due to reach the asteroid and begin orbiting it in 2029.