Space News & Blog Articles

NASA and China plan to mount crewed missions to Mars in the next decade. While this represents a tremendous leap in terms of space exploration, it also presents significant logistical and technological challenges. For starters, missions can only launch for Mars every 26 months when our two planets are at the closest points in their orbit to each other (during an “Opposition“). Using current technology, it would take six to nine months to transit from Earth to Mars.

Most stars will end their lives as white dwarfs. White dwarfs are the remnant cores of once-luminous stars like our Sun, but they’ve left their lives of fusion behind and no longer generate heat. They’re destined to glow with only their residual energy for billions of years before they eventually fade to black.

Tech billionaire Jared Isaacman who flew to space on the Inspiration4 mission last year has announced another flight, with the aim of conducting the first-ever commercial spacewalk.

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!