Space News & Blog Articles

Work continues on designs for robots that can help assist the first human explorers on the Moon in over half a century. One of the most important aspects of that future trip will be utilizing the resources available on the Moon’s surface, known as in-situ resource utilization (ISRU). This would give the explorers access to materials like water, structural metals, and propellant, but only if they can recover it from the rock and regolith that make up the Moon’s surface. A new paper from researchers mainly affiliated with Tohoku University describes the design and testing of a type of robot excavator that could one day assist lunar explorers in unlocking the world’s potential.

For decades, astronauts traveling to space were forced to subsist on a diet that largely consisted of freeze-dried and packaged food. This changed with the introduction of plant-growing operations in orbit, like the Vegetable Production System (Veggie) aboard the International Space Station (ISS). But in what is a really big first, the China National Space Agency (CNSA) has installed a new in-orbit barbecue system aboard the Tiangong space station. In a recent video (shown below) released by the China Central Television (CCTV), we see the current crew of the Tiangong giving the BBQ a whirl!

As stars age, they expand. That’s bad news for planets orbiting close to their stars, according to a new study published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society this month. The study suggests that planets closest to their stars, especially those that orbit their stars in just 12 days or less, are at a higher risk of being sent to their doom by their aging suns.

Long before humans reached orbit, insects had already proven they could handle spaceflight. Fruit flies travelled aboard a V-2 rocket in 1947, becoming the first animals to reach space and survive the journey. Since then, countless creepy crawlies have followed, from bumblebees and houseflies to ants and stick insects, helping scientists understand how living organisms cope with the extreme environment beyond Earth's atmosphere.

October and November 2024 proved to be particularly productive for gravitational wave astronomy. Within the two months, the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration detected two black hole mergers with such unusual properties that they're changing our understanding of how they form and evolve. Both events feature rapidly spinning black holes in unequal mass pairs, properties that point toward a violent history of previous collisions rather than a quiet stellar origin.

At a young age, we're told how the Sun warms the Earth and makes life possible. That idea sticks with most of us for life. But when we want to understand things more thoroughly and we dig more deeply, we learn that Earth its own heat sources that help it maintian habitability: remnant heat and radioactive decay. Other rocky worlds can have these sources, too.