Space News & Blog Articles

TESS, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite has been on the lookout for alien worlds since 2018. It has just hit the news again having identified an extreme triple star system where two stars orbit each other every 1.8 days. The third component circles them both in 25 days – this puts the entire system within the orbit of Mercury with a little wriggle room to spare! To visual observers, it looks like a single star but the power of TESS revealed a flicker as the stars line up and pass one another along our line of sight. Eventually, the two inner stars will merge, triggering a supernova event!

Every second in the Universe, more than 3,000 new stars form as clouds of dust and gas undergo gravitational collapse. Afterward, the remaining dust and gas settle into a swirling disk that feeds the star’s growth and eventually accretes to form planets – otherwise known as a protoplanetary disk. While this model, known as the Nebular Hypothesis, is the most widely accepted theory, the exact processes that give rise to stars and planetary systems are not yet fully understood. Shedding light on these processes is one of the many objectives of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

China have a roadmap to sent astronauts to the Moon in 2030 and when they do, they are going with a very definite nod to the Chinese origins to the rocket! Their officials have unveiled the new look Chinese space suit with all the mod cons but with a design that is somewhat reminiscent of Chinese armour. There will some fabulous features like the close and long distance field of view visor, a chest control panel and a protective material to shield against the harmful lunar environment. 

Mining the Moon to extract its resources is a critical step on humanity’s path into the solar system. One of the most common resources on the Moon is considered relatively valuable here on Earth – titanium. At $10,000 a ton, it is one of the more valuable metals used in various industries, such as aerospace and nanotechnology. So, could we utilize titanium from the Moon to supply Earth’s economy with more of this valuable material? That question is the focus of a paper from researchers at Uppsala University in Finland.

The European Space Agency’s Hera spacecraft is on its way to do follow-up observations of Dimorphos, two years after an earlier probe knocked the mini-asteroid into a different orbital path around a bigger space rock.