Space News & Blog Articles

We’ve been talking about sending a radio telescope to the far side of the Moon for awhile now. Now that reality is one step closer with the completion of the design and construction phase of the Lunar Surface Electromagnetics Experiment-Night (LuSEE-Night) radio telescope project. This milestone marks a major step in the development of the system, which is planned to launch on a lunar lander in 2026.

What can carbon dioxide (CO₂) on Saturn’s moons teach scientists about their formation and evolution? This is what a recent study submitted to The Planetary Science Journal hopes to address as a team of researchers investigated the different types of CO₂ that exist on several of Saturn’s mid-sized moons. This study has the potential to help scientists better understand the existence of CO₂ on planetary bodies and what this could mean for their formation and evolution, and potentially whether they could possess life as we know it.

Collaboration has always been a hallmark of space research. Experts in different disciplines come together to work towards a common goal, and many times achieve that. One of the current goals of space exploration is long-term settlement of the Moon, and in order to achieve that goal, engineers and astronauts will have to deal with one of the thorniest problems on that otherworldly body - dust. Lunar dust is much harder to deal with that Earth’s equivalent, as it is sharp, charged, and sticks to everything, including biological tissue such as lungs, and even relatively smooth surfaces like glass. Several research groups are working on mitigation techniques that can deal with lunar dust, but a new cross-collaborative group from the University of Central Florida is developing a coating, testing it, and simulating all in one project, with the hopes that someday their solution will make it easier for astronauts to explore our nearest neighbor.

In January of 2024, the company Astrobiotic was set to make history with the first privately-developed lander, named Peregrine, to reach the Lunar surface, sent aboard a United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur rocket. The lander carried the usual sorts of scientific instruments, many of them developed by NASA and its research partners. But tucked away among all those instruments was a small payload, with spots in that cargo sold by the companies Celestis and Elysium Space.

Plenty of groups have been theorizing about Primordial Black Holes (PBHs) recently. That is in part because of their candidacy as a potential source of dark matter. But, if they existed, they also had other roles to play in the early universe. According to a recent draft paper released on arXiv by Jeremy Mould and Adam Batten of Swinburne University, one of those roles could be as the seeds that eventually form both quasars and radio galaxies.