Space News & Blog Articles

Was there once life on Mars? That question has been the subject of ongoing exploration and research for more than half a century, and is closely tied to questions about how and when life emerged on Earth. At present, there are six active missions exploring the Red Planet for possible evidence of past life (and possibly present), including NASA's Perseverance rover, the Curiosity rover, and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), the UAE's Hope orbiter, the ESA's ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO), and China's Tianwen-1 orbiter and rover. In the near future, they will be joined by Tianwen-3, a sample-return mission consisting of two spacecraft.

Some exoplanets in their stars' habitable zones may be distinctly uninhabitable due to solar flaring. Red dwarfs are known for powerful flaring, and since they're dim and their habitable zones are close to the star, these flares could sterilize any planets and render them totally uninhabitable. But red dwarfs aren't the only stars that flare; most do, including our Sun.

The question of how life began has captivated humanity for millennia. Now, a team of scientists are preparing to use NASA's upcoming Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) to test different theories about life's origins by studying planets beyond our Solar System.

Imagine a space telescope with a mirror stretching 50 meters across! That’s larger than the width of a UK soccer field and nearly eight times wider than the James Webb Space Telescope. Now imagine that this enormous mirror is made not of precisely manufactured glass segments, but of liquid floating in space. This might sound like science fiction but it's the cutting edge concept behind the Fluidic Telescope (FLUTE), a joint NASA-Technion project that could revolutionise how we explore the universe.

Every time you take off from Heathrow, land at JFK, or pass through any major airport, you might be inadvertently announcing humanity's existence to alien civilizations up to 200 light years away. New research reveals that the radar systems keeping our skies safe are simultaneously broadcasting powerful signals deep into space, signals that could serve as cosmic adverts of our very existence.

We know that there are many asteroids in the Solar System that pose a potential threat. We're getting better at detecting them, and every few months we learn of another one on a potential course to strike Earth. It's obviously in our best self-preservation interest to detect these objects and to figure out how to protect the planet from them. That's what led to NASA's DART (Double-Asteroid Redirection Test).

With the recent first light milestone for the Vera Rubin observatory, it's only a matter of time before one of astronomy’s most long-awaited surveys begins. The Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) is set to start on November 5th, and will scan the sky of billions of stars for at least ten years. One of the most important things it hopes to find is evidence (or lack thereof) of primordial black holes (PBHs), one of the primary candidates for dark matter. A new paper from researchers at Durham University and the University of New Mexico looks at the difficulties the LSST will have in finding those enigmatic objects, especially the statistical challenges, and how they might be overcome.

On Earth, water is so intertwined with life that our search for life on other worlds is essentially a search for water. When scientists find exoplanets around distant stars, a primary consideration is if they're in the stars' habitable zones where liquid water could persist on the planet's surface. The search for atmospheric biosignatures takes a backseat to the search for water.