Space News & Blog Articles

The Great Red Spot of Jupiter is a storm that has raged for hundreds of years. It was first observed by Gian Domenico Cassini in 1665, and except for a period between 1713 to 1830, it has been observed continuously ever since. Even if Cassini’s storm is not the one we see today, the current red spot has been around for nearly two centuries. While great storms appear now and then on Saturn and other gas planets, they don’t have the staying power of Jupiter’s great storm. Or so we thought.

The hunt for alien life and its radio signals from beyond our Solar System is still coming up dry. But, it’s not for lack of looking for possible advanced civilizations.

A few years ago, there was a panic about lithium-ion batteries that exploded and could do things like take down a jetliner. On a recent trip, an airline asked passengers to turn in any devices with batteries that had been banned because of safety concerns. These are indicators of a widely understood downside of lithium-ion batteries, ubiquitous in cell phones, laptops, and other electronic hardware – they can easily catch fire very spectacularly. However, a team at the Aerospace Company is working on an idea to turn this potentially catastrophic event into an asset – by using it to deorbit defunct satellites.

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.