Space News & Blog Articles

Mars exploration vehicles typically have wheels, allowing them to traverse some challenging terrain on the Red Planet. However, eventually, their systems start to wear down, and one of their wheels gets stuck. The “Free Spirit” campaign in 2009 was the most widely known case. Unfortunately, that campaign wasn’t successful, and now, 15 years later, Spirit remains stuck in its final resting place. Things might have been different if NASA had adopted a new robot paradigm developed by Guangming Chen and his colleagues at the Nanjing University of Aeronautics & Astronautics Lab of Locomotion Bioinspiration and Intelligent Robots. They devised a robot based on a desert lizard, with adaptable feet and a flexible “spine” that, according to their calculations, would be well suited to traversing over Martian regolith.

Dark matter is a mysterious and captivating subject. It’s a strange concept and we don’t really have a handle on what it actually is. One of the strongest pieces of evidence that dark matter is a particle comes from cosmic collisions. These collisions chiefly occur when clusters of galaxies interact such as the famous Bullet Cluster. Gravitational lensing reveals how the dark matter component couples from gas and dust in the cluster but now, astronomers have found another galaxy cluster collision but it is different, showing the collision from a new angle. 

Johannes Kepler is probably most well known for developing the laws of planetary motion. He was also a keen solar observer and in 1607 made some wonderful observations of our nearest star using a camera obscura. His drawings were wonderfully precise and enabled astronomers to pinpoint where the Sun was in its 11-year cycle. Having taken into account Kepler’s location and the location of sunspots, a team of researchers have identified the Sun was nearing the end of solar cycle-13.

Mercury, the closest planet to our Sun, is also one of the least understood in the Solar System. On the one hand, it is similar in composition to Earth and the other rocky planets, consisting of silicate minerals and metals differentiated between a silicate crust and mantle and an iron-nickel core. But unlike the other rocky planets, Mercury’s core makes up a much larger part of its mass fraction. Mercury also has a mysteriously persistent magnetic field that scientists still cannot explain. In this respect, Mercury is also one of the most interesting planets in the Solar System.

The JWST has directly imaged its first exoplanet, a temperate super Jupiter only about 12 light-years away from Earth. It could be the oldest and coldest planet ever detected.

Venus’s atmosphere has drawn a lot of attention lately. In particular, the consistent discovery of phosphine in its clouds points to potential biological sources. That, in turn, has resulted in numerous suggested missions, including floating a balloon into the atmosphere or having a spacecraft scoop down and suck up atmospheric samples. But a team of engineers led by Jeffrey Balcerski, now an adjunct at Kent State University but then part of the Ohio Aerospace Institute, came up with a different idea years ago – use floating sensor platforms shaped like leaves to collect a wide variety of data throughout Venus’ atmosphere.

It’s not always possible to observe the night sky from the surface of the Earth. The blocking effects of the atmosphere mean we sometimes need to put telescopes out into space. The Chandra X-Ray Observatory is one such telescopes and it has just completed its 25th year of observations. To celebrate, NASA have just released 25 never-before-seen images of various celestial objects in x-rays. The collection includes images showing the region around black holes, giant clouds of hot gas and extreme magnetic fields. Sadly though, NASA is planning on shutting down the mission to save budget so best to enjoy the images while you can. 

SpaceX is flying again after the Federal Aviation Administration ruled that the company can resume Falcon 9 rocket launches while the investigation into a failed July 11 mission continues.