Space News & Blog Articles

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.

On July 28th, the European Space Agency commanded its long-working Aeolus wind profile mission to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere. It did that and disintegrated into pieces over Antarctica. Of course, satellites do this often. But, Aeolus was different. It maneuvered its way into a safe re-entry profile, a first-of-its kind activity designed to avoid populated regions on Earth.

A coronal mass ejection erupted from the Sun on October 28th, 2021, spreading solar energetic particles (SEPs) across a volume of space measuring more than 250 million km (155.34 million mi) wide. This means that the event was felt on Earth, Mars, and the Moon, which was on the opposite side of the Sun at the time. It was also the first time that a solar event was measured simultaneously by robotic probes on Earth, Mars, and the Moon, which included ESA’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) and Eu:CROPIS orbiter, NASA’s Curiosity rover and Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), and China’s Chang’e-4 lander.

Brace yourselves for great JWST views of the iconic Ring Nebula (M57). An international team of astronomers just released a fantastic near-infrared image of the nebula, showing incredible details.