Space News & Blog Articles

Graphene has long been put forward as a wonder material. Undeniably, it has astounding properties – stronger than steel, a better electrical conductor than copper, and lighter than almost anything else with similar properties. And while it’s been partially adopted into space-faring technologies, many use cases remain where a pure form of the material could dramatically benefit the space industry. To detail those opportunities, a group of scientists from the Italian Space Agency recently released a paper that looked at graphene’s role in space exploration – and where it might stand to make an even bigger impact shortly.

Astronomers have discovered a pair of star-like objects orbiting each other extremely quickly, with an entire ‘year’ lasting just 1.9 Earth hours. Catchily named ZTF J2020+5033, the system consists of one object which is definitely a small star, and another that straddles the boundary between star and planet. The two objects appear to be very old, and understanding how they came to be orbiting so close together is teaching astronomers more about how solar systems change and evolve.

One of the striking things about iron meteorites is that they are often magnetic. The magnetism isn’t strong, but it holds information about their origin. This is why astronomers discourage meteorite hunters from using magnets to distinguish meteorites from the surrounding rock, since hand magnets can erase the magnetic history of a meteorite, which is an important scientific record.

It’s sometimes hard to remember that meteorites have been hitting our planets for millions of years. And some of them are made of valuable materials such as titanium or iron. So, theoretically, at least, our bronze and iron age ancestors could utilize these ready-made metallic rocks without having to dig underground to access them, like they would with regular tin or iron veins. Now, a new study of an arrowhead made out of a meteorite points out just how valuable iron age society thought these meteorites were and hints at a trade network that reached farther than archeologists initially thought.

Additive manufacturing is slowly becoming more and more useful as the technology improves. One of the places it continues its development is in the realm of space exploration. It has long been mooted as an integral part of any in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) efforts and is especially important for ensuring early explorers on the Moon have the right tools and materials they need to survive. The European Space Agency is supporting that research effort, as their Technology Development Element fund supported work by an Austrian company called Incus to develop a 3D printing solution that could reprint metal parts on the Moon.

Nearly two million years ago a species of upright apes known as homo erectus began to utilize fire. It was a gradual process, from opportunistic users of natural fires to masters able to craft flames from flint and tender. We are their descendants. We are creatures of forge and kiln, hearth and home. Fire has become so central to us that instead of homo sapiens, we could call ourselves homo ignus, the fire-wielding ape. Fire is central to the rise of our civilization. It cooks our food, keeps us warm, and illuminates our night. This raises an interesting question. Could we have built a civilization without fire?

What’s better than one lunar rover? Three lunar rovers! In 2024, NASA plans to send a team of suitcase-sized wheeled robots to the Moon as part of the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. Collectively called CADRE – Cooperative Autonomous Distributed Robotic Exploration – the rovers will spend one full lunar day (14 Earth days) exploring the Moon and showing off their unique capabilities.

We’ve been getting plenty of spectacular images from the James Webb Space Telescope since it began operations last year. Fraser even covered everything we learned from it in a video a few weeks ago. But the news keeps coming, and recently a science team known as the Prime Extra-Galactic Areas for Reionization and Lensing Science (PEARLS) team released a series of four papers describing Webb’s observations of a galaxy cluster known as El Gordo (“the fat one” in Spanish). But what’s more – they also released another absolutely stunning picture.