Space News & Blog Articles

One of the first verified predictions of general relativity is the gravitational deflection of starlight. The effect was [first observed in 1919 during a total solar eclipse.](https://briankoberlein.com/post/einstein-and-eddington/) Since stars appear as points of light, the effect is seen as an apparent shift in the position of stars near the eclipse. But the effect happens more generally. If a distant galaxy is obscured by a closer one, some of the distant light is gravitationally lensed around the closer galaxy, giving us a warped and distorted view of the faraway stars. This effect can also magnify the distant galaxy, making its light appear brighter, and we have used this effect to observe some of the most distant stars in the Universe.

NASA's Orion crew module test article is framed by the well deck of the U.S. Navy's USS Somerset as teams practice Artemis 2 recovery ops.

SpaceX is building Starship as a full reusable heavy-lift rocket to fly astronauts to the moon and Mars.

In-situ resource utilization will likely play a major role in any future long-term settlement of the Moon. However, designing such a system in advance with our current level of knowledge will prove difficult, mainly because there's so much uncertainty around both the availability of those resources and the efficacy of the processes used to extract them. Luckily, researchers have tools that can try to deal with both of those uncertainties - statistical modeling. A team from Imperial College London, the University of Munich, and the Luxembourg Institue of Science and Technology recently released a pre-print paper on arXiv that uses a well-known statistical modeling method known as Monte Carlo simulation to try to assess what type of ISRU plan would be best for use on the Moon.

Even though Jupiter's moon Io is considered the most volcanically active world in the Solar System, Venus actually has more volcanoes and volcanic features on its surface. For a long time, scientists thought that most of these features and volcanoes were ancient remnants of the planet's geological past. However, newer research shows that Venus is still volcanically active.

The Hubble Space Telescope has sent back a gorgeous new view of one of our nearest galactic neighbors, which is full of bright, colorful stars.

NASA's flight directors have taken a page from the astronauts they support, if not also the Masters, Hells Angels and Saturday Night Live's Five-Timers Club. There is now a flight director's jacket.

The U.S. Space Force is funding the development of a new "Orbital Carrier" spacecraft that can deploy multiple satellites when needed.

Read the latest edition of ESA Impact

Image: Biomass cleared for fuelling

Researchers have created a "fingerprint" of a sulfur-based molecule found in space that may offer new clues about the formation of life on Earth.

SpaceX's Fram2 astronaut mission is set to launch toward a polar orbit on March 31, which will be a first for human spaceflight. Why has this never been done before?

SpaceX plans to launch the Fram2 astronaut mission over Earth's poles tonight (March 31), and you can watch the action live.

'Capturing the partial solar eclipse from the iconic landmark at Stonehenge was awe-inspiring in more ways than one'

Cosmic rays may play a role in triggering lightning, a new study suggests, offering an out-of-this-world answer to a long-standing mystery.

A newly found super-Earth could help provide answers as to why there are hardly any planets twice the diameter of Earth.

Launched just seven months ago, ESA’s Arctic Weather Satellite has been proving how the New Space approach can accelerate the development of missions capable of delivering detailed temperature and humidity profiles for short-term weather forecasts.

What kinds of scientific instruments can be used to sample the plumes of Enceladus with the goal of identifying the ingredients for life as we know it? This is what a recent study presented at the 56th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference hopes to address as a team of international researchers investigated how the novel High Ice Flux Instrument (HIFI) could be the next-generation instrument used to sample the plumes of Enceladus while building off the groundbreaking findings from the NASA Cassini spacecraft’s Cosmic Dust Analyzer (CDA). This study has the potential to help scientists and engineers develop new and efficient methodologies for finding life on Enceladus and throughout the solar system.

How can scientists and engineers build off the success of NASA’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter to better explore the Red Planet? This is what a recent study presented at the 56th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference hopes to address as an aerospace executive with more than two decades of research and engineering experience investigated how a next-generation Mars helicopter could conduct groundbreaking science while delivering peak efficiency and performance. This study has the potential to help scientists and engineers develop new methods for exploring Mars with cost-effective and efficient methods.

What can cryovolcanism on the dwarf planet Ceres teach us about potential cryovolcanism on Uranus’ five largest moons, which include Oberon, Umbriel, Ariel, Titania, and Miranda? This is what two studies recently presented at the 56th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference hopes to address, as a team of researchers investigated using Ceres as an analog for the potential ocean moons, Umbriel and Oberon, and the likelihood of an impact crater on Umbriel showing evidence of cryovolcanism. These studies have the potential to help researchers better understand the formation and evolution of ocean worlds in the outer solar system and whether they could potentially have life as we know it.

When it comes to the planets produced in protoplanetary disks, size matters, but not the way you might think. That's the conclusion a group of astronomers found when they aimed the Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Chile at hundreds of these disks around young stars in the southern constellation Lupus. They used the observatory in 2023 and 2024 to focus on the disks and supplemented that with archival data.