Space News & Blog Articles

It is true that crewed missions to the Moon are expensive, difficult, and dangerous. And we now have a long history going back decades of reliable, dependable, capable robotic exploration, including fly-bys, orbiters, landers, and rovers. Why don’t we look at how much human spaceflight would cost to return to the moon, and just spend that money on lots of robots instead?

Sometimes serendipity happens in science. Whether it’s an apple falling from a tree or a melting chocolate bar, some of the world’s greatest discoveries come from happy accidents, even if their stories may be apocryphal. According to a new paper on arXiv, there’s a new story to add to the archives of serendipitous scientific discoveries - Rubin happened to make observations of interstellar object 3I/ATLAS before its official discovery, while the telescope was still in its Science Validation survey, marking the earliest, high resolution images we will likely get of the comet at that time.

Betelgeuse is a star that's never out of the news for long. It made headlines in recent years when it dimmed considerably, and since it's a red supergiant, people wondered if it was about to explode as a supernova. That expectation died down when scientists showed that the dimming is because of dust, but now Betelgeuse is in the news again, this time because of a newly-discovered companion star.

Located in the Atacama desert in northern Chile, the Atacama Large Millimeter-submillimeter Array (ALMA) and its many radio antennas are dedicated to studying the unseen Universe. Meanwhile, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has been using its advanced infrared instruments to visualize another unseen part of the Universe. Together, the two observatories have seen, for the first time, hot minerals in a distant solar system beginning to solidify to create a small planetesimal. In short, these observations have allowed astronomers to pinpoint the moment when planets begin to form.

When astronauts return from the International Space Station, many have noticed an unexpected side effect of their mission, their eyesight has changed. This phenomenon, affecting about 70% of astronauts on long duration missions, has NASA scientists working to understand why weightlessness effects how we see.

Just imagine it, the news stories are all over your phone when you wake! The day will surely come that we will discover that we are not alone in the Universe! What happens the day after though? A new research paper from the SETI Post Detection Hub at the University of St Andrews tackles this question, outlining how NASA and the global scientific community should prepare for the moment humanity detects signs of extraterrestrial intelligence.

A team of scientists have developed a new material that could transform how we build equipment for space missions and other extremely cold environments. This new copper based alloy maintains its unique "shape memory" properties even at temperatures as cold as -200°C.

Magnetic fields play an important, if sometimes underappreciated, part in planetary systems. Without a strong magnetic field, planets can end up as a barren wasteland like Mars, or they could indirectly affect massive storms as can be seen on Jupiter. However, our understanding of planetary magnetic fields are limited to the eight planets in our solar system, as we haven’t yet accrued much data on the magnetic fields of exoplanets. That could be about to change, according to a new preprint paper by a group of research scientists from Europe, the US, India and the UAE.