Space News & Blog Articles

In a recent Hot Take segment, the China Global Television Network recently released an interesting video detailing China's future plans for space. Titled "Earth 2.0? China's plan to find new Earth," the video actually details four missions that the China National Space Agency (CNSA) has planned as part of the country's 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-2030). These missions cover a broad range of next-generation science objectives that space agencies worldwide want to achieve in the coming decades.

The May 2024 Gannon Solar Storm had a massive impact of the Earth’s space weather environment.

What are other solar system's like? How is our similar to others, and how is it different? In this age of exoplanet discovery, we've found more than 6,000 confirmed exoplanets, and while some of the planets in our system are similar to exoplanets, the exoplanet population contains planet types that aren't reflected in our system.

It’s been over two years since the samples from Bennu gathered by OSIRIS-REx were returned to Earth. But there’s still plenty of novel science coming out of that 121.6 g of material. Three new papers were released recently that describe different aspects of that sample. One in particular, from Yoshihiro Furukawa of Tohoku University in Japan and their co-authors, has already attracted plenty of attention, including from US Senator (and former astronaut) Mark Kelly. It shows that all of the building blocks for early life were available on the asteroid - raising the chances that planets throughout the galaxy could be seeded with the abiotic precursors for life.

What can mapped drainage systems on Mars teach scientists about the Red Planet’s watery past? This is what a recent study published in the *Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences* hopes to address as a team of scientists from the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) conducted a first-time mapping study involving Martian river basins. This study has the potential to not only gain insight into ancient Mars and how much water existed there long ago but also develop new methods for mapping ancient river basins on Mars and potentially other worlds.

Your sunscreen sits in the bathroom cabinet, slowly changing. The mayonnaise in your fridge gradually separates. That prescription cream loses effectiveness over time. All these materials share something fundamental, they're soft matter, substances like gels, foams, and colloids whose internal structure reorganises slowly and mysteriously over months or years.