Space News & Blog Articles

Imagine you're watching a balloon inflate, but instead of slowing down as it gets bigger, it keeps expanding faster and faster. That's essentially what scientists discovered about our universe in 1998 using exploding stars called supernovae. They found that some unknown force, which was subsequently named "dark energy” was pushing space itself apart at an accelerating rate. Now, after analyzing over 2,000 of these stellar explosions, researchers have found hints that dark energy might not be as constant as we thought. It may actually be changing, and possibly weakening over time.

Recreating the environment that most spacecraft experience on their missions is difficult on Earth. Many times it involves large vacuum chambers or wind tunnels that are specially designed for certain kinds of tests. But sometimes, engineers get to just do larger scale versions of the things they got to do in high school. That is the case for a recent test of ExoMars’s parachute system. A team of ESA engineers and their contractors performed a scaled up egg-drop test common in physics classes across the world. Except this one involved a stratospheric balloon the size of a football field and a helicopter.

When rocket engines fire during lunar landings, they don't just kick up a little dust. They unleash massive clouds of high speed particles that behave like natural sandblasting jets, capable of damaging expensive equipment, solar panels, and even entire habitats. As space agencies prepare for permanent lunar settlements through programs like NASA's Artemis mission, understanding this phenomenon has become a matter of survival.

The frontrunner in this new space race is, of course, NASA. They’re the only organization to have even done it before in the first place, but that was 50 years ago. And while all the technology of the Apollo program still exists in the form of blueprints and designs, all the human expertise that went into crafting those rockets and spaceships is now either retired or passed away. Besides, we’re not spending nearly as much money on the modern space program than we were in the 1950’s and 60’s, and to be quite frank, the Apollo missions were outright dangerous – they had a level of risk that is completely unacceptable to modern standards. When the Apollo 1 disaster happened, killing three astronauts during a launch dress rehearsal in 1967, NASA paused human spaceflight…for less than two years. An event like that today would likely shut down programs for at least a decade.

Finding an exoplanet in a star's habitable zone always generates interest. Each of these planets has a chance, even if it's an infinitesimal one, of hosting simple life. While the possibility of detecting life on these distant planets is remote, finding them still teaches us about exoplanet populations and solar system architectures.