Space News & Blog Articles

Radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) are the power plants of the interplanetary spacecraft. Or at least they have been for going on 50 years now. But they have significant drawbacks, the primary one being that they’re heavy. Even modern-day RTG designs run into the hundreds of kilograms, making them useful for large-scale missions like Perseverance but prohibitively large for any small-scale mission that wants to get to the outer planets. Solar sails aren’t much better, with a combined solar sail and battery system, like the one on Juno, coming in at more than twice the weight of a similarly powered RTG. To solve this problem, a group of engineers from the Aerospace Corporation and the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Lab came up with a way to take the underlying idea of an RTG and shrink it dramatically to the point where it could not potentially be used for much smaller missions.

Most of the comets we see in the sky were born in our solar system. They may have formed deep within the Oort cloud, and for some, it is their first visit to the inner solar system, but they are distinctly children of the Sun. We know of only two objects that came from beyond our solar system, Omuamua and Borisov. There are likely other interstellar objects visiting our solar system, we just haven’t found them. But that’s likely to change when Rubin Observatory comes online.

Multiple space agencies plan to send astronauts, cosmonauts, and taikonauts to the Moon in the coming years, with the long-term goal of establishing a permanent human presence there. This includes the NASA-led Artemis Program, which aims to create a “sustained program of lunar exploration and development” by the decade’s end. There’s also the competing Russo-Chinese International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) effort to create a series of facilities “on the surface and/or in orbit of the Moon” that will enable lucrative research.

The south pole of Mars is a likely candidate for future exploration efforts there. It is also an area of interest for astrobiologists, as there is a decent chance that there might be signs of ancient water there and, therefore, signs of ancient life – if there was any on the Red Planet anyway. But to access that ancient life, explorers would have to get to it, which means digging much further than has ever been dug on Mars before. Typical deep-bore drilling equipment is bulky, heavy, and difficult to set up on remote terrain like the Martian South Pole. So a group of engineers from Planet Enterprises, a Space Technology Incubator based in Washington, developed a new deep bore drilling concept they call Borebots.

Binary star systems often appear as variable stars. When we can’t see the individual stars because they are either too close together or too far away, we can see the gradual brightening and dimming of a single point of light as the stars orbit each other. Sometimes if the stars are particularly close when they pass each other they can brighten in unusual ways. One example of this is known as a heartbeat star.

In a surprising find, the international ALMA Survey of Orion Planck Galactic Cold Clumps (ALMASOP) team recently observed a young quadruple star system within a star-forming region in the Orion constellation. The discovery was made during a high-resolution survey of 72 dense cores in the Orion Giant Molecular Clouds (GMCs) using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile. These observations provide a compelling explanation for the origins and formation mechanisms of binary and multiple-star systems.

Understanding what lies under the lunar surface could be critical to future exploration efforts. A series of missions have already mapped some parts of the sub-surface of the Moon. Still, few have delved deep inside, where large lava caverns or potentially valuable water or mineral deposits may lie. But that might be about to change. NASA’s Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) supplied funding to a novel technology developed by a team at its Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) that could solve the long-standing problem of seeing what lies within the Moon.