Space News & Blog Articles

Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (NASA-JPL) are busy keeping the Perseverance rover and Ingenuity helicopter functioning in Jezero Crater on Mars while these robotic explorers continue the search for ancient microbial life on the Red Planet. But some of those same engineers have also been busy working with LEGO designers on new one-tenth-scale LEGO Technic buildable models of these very same robotic explorers with the goal of inspiring the next generation of NASA scientists and engineers.

We say it all the time here at UT – getting to space is hard. It’s even more hard to do new and interesting things in space. And when projects get hard, that usually means they cost more money. That is certainly the case for one of the most anticipated missions on NASA’s current docket – the Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission. And it’s not looking like it’s going to get any easier anytime soon.

In exoplanetology, the ring around the star is often called the “Goldilocks zone,” in reference to the 19th-century fairy tale Goldilocks and the Three Bears. In that story, Goldilocks encounters sets of three objects that are either too extreme for her liking or just right. In the case of a bowl of porridge, the three are too hot, too cold, and just right, hence the analogy to an exoplanet’s position around its star. If it’s too close to its parent star, the planet is too hot, and liquid water, the necessary ingredient for life, won’t exist. If it’s too far, the planet is too cold, and the only water on its surface will be ice. But even the “just right” category has some wiggle room. Many planetary scientists consider Venus to be on the inner edge of our star’s “just right” habitable zone. So why did it end up with such a different fate than our pale blue dot? A team of researchers, led by Lisa Kaltenegger at Cornell, think they have found a way to answer that question – by turning the world’s most powerful space telescope towards a star about 100 light years away and directly observing an exoplanet’s atmosphere.

A stellar nursery sounds like a placid place where baby stars go about their business undisturbed. But, of course, a stellar nursery is nothing like that. (Babies are noisy and cry a lot.) They’re dynamic places where powerful elemental forces rage mightily and bend the surroundings to their will. And this one, even though its name is the drowsy-sounding Smiling Cat Nebula, is no exception.

Remember how a new car smells? It’s a chemical signature of all the materials used to make the car’s interior. What if you could use chemical signatures to learn about newborn planets?

Since the 1990s, thanks to observations by the venerable Hubble Space Telescope (HST), astronomers have contemplated the mystery of cosmic expansion. While scientists have known about this since the late-1920s and early-30s, images acquired by Hubble‘s Ultra Deep Fields campaign revealed that the expansion has been accelerating for the past six billion years! This led scientists to reconsider Einstein’s theory that there is an unknown force in the Universe that “holds back gravity,” which he named the Cosmological Constant. To astronomers and cosmologists today, this force is known as “Dark Energy.”