Space News & Blog Articles

As global warming heats up our atmosphere a degree at a time, the world’s glaciers are paying the price. In ten years, they’ve shrunk by a total of 2 percent. To look at it another way, collectively the glaciers have lost 2,720 gigatons of ice thanks to warming air.

It was an exciting time when, two weeks ago, SpaceX got the clearance it needed to conduct its first orbital flight test with the Starship and Super Heavy launch system. After years of waiting, SN flight tests, static fire tests, and stacking and unstacking, the long-awaited test of the SN24 Starship and BN7 Booster prototype was on! For this flight, SpaceX hoped to achieve an altitude of at least 150 km (90 mi) above sea level, crossing the 100 km (62 mi) threshold that officially marks the boundary of “space” (aka. the Karman Line) and making a partial transit around the world before splashing down off the coast of Hawaii.

Close-orbiting binaries are a ticking time bomb. Over time they spiral ever closer to each other until they merge in a cataclysmic explosion such as a supernova. But in the middle of their story, things can get interesting. Some stars collapse into a white dwarf before merging with their partner, others edge so close to each other that their surfaces touch for a time, becoming contact binaries before finally colliding. But one newly discovered binary system will have a wild ride before its final demise.

Our favorite Martian helicopter did it again. The tiny Ingenuity chopper recently did its 51st flight on Mars. It traveled 188 meters this time (about 617 feet) on April 22, 2023, and reached a maximum altitude of 12 meters (about 39 feet) over the Martian surface. During that time, it snapped another image of its Perseverance mothership, waiting patiently on the horizon.

Imagine you’re a lunar astronaut, putting in a hard day’s work building your lab or excavating moon rocks. You get back into the hab and ask, “What’s for dinner?” The answer could be “We’re starting with a Moon salad” featuring lettuce and other goodies grown on the lunar surface. It’s an idea scientists are researching as part of a project called LunarPlant, an effort to figure out ways to grow healthy veggies on the Moon.

Last week, NASA shared a blog post saying they detected a sensor glitch associated with the James Webb Space Telescope’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI). For some reason, the sensor for MIRI’s Medium Resolution Spectroscopy (MRS) is receiving less light than expected at the longest wavelengths.

Supernovae are incredibly common in the universe. Based on observations of isotopes such as aluminum-26, we know that a supernova occurs on average about every fifty years in the Milky Way alone. A supernova can outshine a galaxy, so you wouldn’t want your habitable planet to be a few light years away when it goes off. Fortunately, most supernovae have occurred very far away from Earth, so we haven’t had to concern ourselves with wearing sunscreen at night. But it does raise an interesting question. When it comes to supernovae, how close is too close? As a recent study shows, the answer depends on the type of supernova.