Space News & Blog Articles

Use cases for smart materials in space exploration keep cropping up everywhere. They are used in everything from antenna deployments on satellites to rover deformation and reformation. One of the latest ideas is to use them to transform the solar sails that could primarily be used as a propulsion system for a mission into a heat shield when that mission reaches its final destination. A new paper from Joseph Ivarson and Davide Guzzetti, both of Auburn’s Department of Aerospace Engineering, and published in Acta Astronautica, describes how the idea might work and lists some potential applications exploring various parts of the solar system.

Mars is not the most hostile place in our Solar System to life but isn’t somewhere to put on your holiday itinerary just yet. Any organism attempting to survive there would face meteorite impacts, extreme temperature changes, ionising radiation cutting through the thin atmosphere, and highly oxidising salts in the Martian soil that destabilise the molecular bonds holding proteins and cells together. It's a combination of factors that, when taken together would seem insurmountable for most terrestrial life to get a foothold.

Between 4.1 and 3 billion years ago, Mars was volcanically active. Massive eruptions existed across the planet's surface, throwing material and gases high into the thin Martian atmosphere. A new study uses climate modelling to explore whether these events could have transported water ice to unexpected regions of the red planet. The team, led by Saira Hamid from Arizona State University simulated the ancient volcanic eruptions to see what happened to water vapour during each event. The results from their study were quite surprising.

Most white dwarf binaries, where two stellar remnants orbit each other, have spent millions of years cooling down to surface temperatures around 4,000 degrees Kelvin. These ancient objects sit quietly in space, slowly radiating away their residual heat. But astronomers have discovered a peculiar class of these binary systems that seems to defy all expectations. These white dwarfs orbit each other faster than once per hour, and instead of being cool and compact, they're far hotter than expected, reaching surface temperatures between 10,000 and 30,000 degrees Kelvin, and twice the size theory predicts they should be.

The corona of the Sun is an extraordinary place, with temperatures exceeding one million degrees Celsius, far hotter than the Sun's visible surface below. During solar flares, violent releases of magnetic energy, plasma can cool dramatically and condense into dense blobs that plummet back toward the Sun's photosphere, its visible surface. These falling streams of cooler material create the phenomenon of coronal rain. However, existing solar models couldn't explain the speed at which this cooling happens.

Black holes are the remains of dead supermassive stars. When a star reaches the end of its life, one of two things will happen, either the thermonuclear pressure from fusion will cause the star’s outer layers to expand or gravity wins and the star collapses. In this latter case, what gets left behind is often a black hole, an object whose conditions are so extreme that even light cannot escape.

Impulse Space, the California-based venture founded by veteran SpaceX engineer Tom Mueller, today unveiled its proposed architecture for delivering medium-sized payloads to the moon by as early as 2028.

Modularity is taking off in more ways than one in space exploration. The design of the upcoming “Lunar Gateway” space station is supposed to be modular, with different modules being supplied by different organizations. In an effort to extend that thinking down to rovers on the ground, a new paper from researchers at Germany’s space agency (DLR), developed an architecture where a single, modular rover could be responsible for both exploration and carrying payloads around the Moon or Mars.

A new study finds possible references to two classic supernovae in ancient texts.