Space News & Blog Articles

Cooling things down in space is trickier than it might sound.  But that is exactly the process the James Webb telescope is going through right now.  Getting down to cryogenic temperature is imperative for its infrared imaging systems to work correctly.  While the telescope has already started, it will be another few weeks before the process is complete, and it’s ready to start capturing its first groundbreaking infrared images of the universe.

Concrete is not the first material one usually thinks of when exploring space.  Nor is it the focus of much cutting-edge research.  The most common building material has been used by humanity for thousands of years.  But surprisingly, little is still known about some of its properties, due in no small part to the limitations of the environments it can be tested in.  Now, this most ubiquitous of materials will be tested in a new environment – the microgravity aboard the International Space Station.

Methane is one of the most important greenhouse gases, despite the overwhelming interest in carbon dioxide emissions as the primary source of climate change.  It is hard to track, though, as its sources can range from leaking chemical and gas pipelines to literal farm fields.  Now an energy analytics company has a system they believe can track otherwise undocumented methane emissions in a way that could prove helpful in eliminating them altogether.

In this series we are exploring the weird and wonderful world of astronomy jargon! You’ll feel balanced with today’s topic: hydrostatic equilibrium!

Last month, astronomers reported that a discarded upper stage of a Falcon 9 rocket, launched 7 years ago, was on a collision course with the Moon. The rocket in question carried NASA’s Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) to the Sun-Earth L1 Lagrange point, where the still-operating observatory provides advance warning on solar wind activities. The leftover rocket stage, meanwhile, became a floating piece of space junk orbiting the Sun. Its ultimate fate was unknown, until last month, when astronomer Bill Gray predicted that it was bound for an impact with the Moon sometime on March 4th, 2022.

Are there civilizations somewhere else in the Universe? Somewhere else in the Milky Way? That’s one of our overarching questions, and an answer in the affirmative would be profound.

When our Sun dies, the Earth will die with it. As a star of middling mass, the Sun will end its life by swelling into a red giant star. After a last cosmic moment of brilliance, the remnant core of the Sun will collapse into a white dwarf. This won’t occur for billions of years, but the mass and composition of the Sun means a white dwarf is its inevitable fate.