Space News & Blog Articles

The Moon has a long history of being smacked by large rocks. Its pock-marked, cratered surface is evidence of that. Scientists expect that, as part of those impacts, some debris would be scattered into space - and that we should be able to track it down. But so far, there have been startlingly few discoveries of these Lunar-origin Asteroids (LOAs) despite their theoretical abundance. A new paper from Yixuan Wu and their colleagues at Tsinghua University explains why - and how the Vera Rubin Observatory might help with finding them.

Mars’ water disappeared somewhere, but scientists have been disagreeing for years about where exactly it went. Data from rovers like Perseverance and Curiosity, along with orbiting satellites such as the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and ExoMars have shown that Mars used to be a wet world with an active hydrodynamic cycle. Obviously it isn’t anymore, but where did all the water go? A new paper that collects data from at least six different instruments on three different spacecraft provides some additional insight into that question - by showing that dust storms push water into the Red Planet’s atmosphere, where it is actively destroyed, all year round.

Fans of the Star Wars franchise will surely remember the iconic scene where Luke Skywalker steps out of his uncle and aunt's home on Tatooine to contemplate his future. Looking to the far horizon, wondering if he will ever get off that desolate desert planet, he gazes upon two setting suns. Naturally, some purists (like myself) would be quick to point out that Lucas "borrowed" this idea from the late and great Frank Herbert (creator of the Dune franchise). Nevertheless, the scene masterfully illustrates why Tatooine is a hostile, unforgiving planet where the indigenous inhabitants are nomads or salvagers, and the primary industry is "moisture farming."

This is Part 3 of a series on large extra dimensions. Read Parts 1 and 2.

For years the scientific consensus was that a supermassive black hole (SMBH) resides in the center of the Milky Way. There's plenty of evidence that the SMBH, named Sagittarius A-star, sits in the Galactic Center (GC). But there were still lingering doubts.

In this period of heightened geopolitical flux, enthusiasm for advances in planetary exploration can be dampened. But that's not stopping NASA from forging ahead in its efforts.

Origami and space exploration might not seem like they have much in common, but the traditional paper-folding technique solves one massive problem for space exploration missions - volume. Satellites and probes that launch in rocket housings are constrained by very restrictive requirements about their physical size, and options for assembling larger structures in orbit are limited to say the least. Anything that can fold up like an origami structure and then expand out to reach a fully functional size is welcome in the space community, and a new paper published in Communications Engineering by Xin Ning of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and his lab describes a novel use case for the idea - electromagnetic waveguides.