Space News & Blog Articles

We live in an age of exoplanet discovery, and have discovered several thousand planets orbiting distant stars. These discoveries hold important lessons about planetary formation and solar system architecture. But we're also discovering a growing number of rogue planets, also called free-floating planets. These planets aren't gravitationally bound to any star. What can they teach us?

In June, technicians at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center began the crucial process of installing the Solar Array Sun Shield aboard the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. This shield comprises six panels covered in solar cells that will provide the observatory with power while keeping its instruments cool throughout its mission. This marked the completion of the telescope's outer section, which was followed by thermal vacuum and electronic systems testing of its core section to ensure that the observatory can survive in the harsh environment of space.

They are known as Little Red Dots, or LRDs. We find them in deep field images of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), and they remain a bit of a mystery. But a new study finds that they are not super-Eddington objects, so while they are unusual, they don't break the known rules of astrophysics.

A billion things had to go just right for Earth to become the life-supporting world it is today. Our planet is just the right distance from the right type of star. It has a hot, convective core that generates its protective shield. And early in its history, it was the recipient of organic molecules and water that shepherded Earth towards habitability. Without impacts from both rocky and icy Solar System bodies, Earth wouldn't have received these materials, and it wouldn't be the planet it is today.

Astronauts exploring the Moon will need all the help they can get, and scientists have spent lots of time and plenty of money coming up with different systems to do so. Two of the critical needs of any long-term lunar mission are food and oxygen, both of which are expensive to ship to the Moon from Earth. So, a research team from the Technical University of Munich spent some of their time analyzing the effectiveness of using local lunar resources to build a photobioreactor (PBR), the results of which were recently published in a paper in Acta Astronautica.