Space News & Blog Articles

For astronomers, the only thing better than new data is more new data. And we seem to be in a golden age of data gathering. We’ve gushed over the latest images from the James Webb Space Telescope and Hubble continues to make observations, but several new space telescopes are lesser known, such as Gaia, TESS, and Swift. And now a new space telescope enters the game, known as Euclid. Euclid is an infrared telescope launched last month by the European Space Agency (ESA). It took 11 years to design and build the telescope, and it has just taken test images with its two primary detectors.

So much in science is based on constraints. If scientists don’t understand something, they try to constrain it as much as possible so that more precise experiments can finally detect whatever the theorized phenomenon is. Dark matter is notoriously difficult in this regard, as it has evaded detection for over a century at this point, despite even more precise instruments trying to capture a glimpse of it. One of those instruments is the Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (SuperCDMS), run by the SLAC National Laboratory and located in northern Minnesota. To help further the cause, researchers looked at the data from the experiment while considering a few new possibilities, and while they didn’t find any evidence of dark matter, they helped tighten the constraints even more.

The Mars Sample Return (MSR) has been going through a rough patch lately. We recently reported on reports coming out about Congress restricting its budget and potential cost overruns. However, like any good government program, progress continues toward the goal of bringing samples until there is a clear order to stop or the money drives up. That wasn’t the case back in March and April when NASA successfully tested two engines that will be used in the Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV).

A pair of studies published in JGR: Planets and Science Advances discuss new findings from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) regarding Jupiter’s first and third Galilean Moons, Io and Ganymede, and more specifically, how the massive Jupiter is influencing activity on these two small worlds. For Io, whose mass is about 21 percent larger than Earth’s Moon, the researchers made the first discovery of sulfur monoxide (SO) gas on the volcanically active moon. For Ganymede, which is the largest moon in the solar system and boasts twice the mass of the Earth’s Moon, the researchers made the first discovery of hydrogen peroxide, which exists in Ganymede’s polar regions.

It probably comes as no surprise to people suffering through drastic weather this year that our planet is heating up. Climate change is the culprit and researchers continue to look for ways to mitigate its effects. A scientist at the University of Hawai’i suggests a novel approach: create a giant solar shade in space to block enough sunlight to counter climate change.