Space News & Blog Articles

Mars, often called the Red Planet due to its rusty iron oxide covered surface, is Earth's smaller, colder neighbour. Orbiting the Sun at an average distance of 228 million kilometres, Mars shares remarkable similarities with Earth; a 24.6 hour day, polar ice caps, seasons driven by a 25.2 degree axial tilt, and evidence of ancient rivers and lakes that once flowed across its surface. Yet Mars today is a harsh world with a thin atmosphere just 1% the density of Earth's, average temperatures of -63°C, and no liquid water on its surface. It has an incredibly thin atmosphere composed primarily of carbon dioxide (95%) which is so tenuous that liquid water cannot exist on the surface, yet it’s still thick enough to generate global dust storms.

The search for extraterrestrial life may soon get a revolutionary new tool which is no bigger than a soft drink can. A team of Dutch scientists are developing the (Origin of) Life Marker Chip (LMCOOL), a device that could detect signs of life on distant worlds. The LMCOOL is best described as a tiny yet complete laboratory in the form of a computer chip. This device is being developed by a Dutch consortium led by TU Delft, with researcher Jurriaan Huskens and his team working to make the optical sensor particularly sensitive for the required biomarkers.

Tumbleweeds offer iconic visual depictions of desolate landscapes. Though typically associated with the American West, the most common type of tumbleweed actually originated in Europe, and is known scientifically as salsola targus, or more commonly as Russian thistle. So its only fitting that a team led by European scientists has some up with an idea based on the tumbleweed’s unique properties that could one day have groups of them exploring Mars.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has revealed some amazing things about the Universe. From the earliest galaxies and planet-forming disks to characterizing exoplanet atmospheres, there is virtually no corner of the cosmos that Webb has not observed in extremely high resolution. This includes the Solar System, where Webb has used its sophisticated infrared instruments and spectrometers to provide the most detailed images ever taken of Jupiter, Saturn, the ice giants, and smaller objects like Dimorphos and the latest cosmic interloper detected, 3I/ATLAS.

Radio astronomy began in the 1930s when Karl Jansky, an engineer at Bell Telephone Laboratories, accidentally discovered radio waves coming from the Milky Way. He was investigating sources of interference in transatlantic radio communications, no-one expected this to be the birth of radio astronomy. The finding opened an entirely new window on the universe, one that could peer through clouds, dust and observe phenomena invisible to optical telescopes. The field really took off after World War II when surplus military radar equipment became available to scientists with major discoveries following rapidly from pulsars to quasars, the cosmic microwave background radiation and the detailed structure of galaxies. Today's radio telescopes, from giant single dishes like the 500 metre FAST telescope in China to vast interferometer arrays like the Square Kilometre Array, continue to revolutionise our understanding of the universe.