Space News & Blog Articles

In what seemed to be a development that came from nowhere, there’s a new entrant into the reusable launch systems competition - Honda. The giant Japanese industrial conglomerate recently launched a prototype reusable rocket up to 300m and landed it safely back on Earth. So what does that mean for the reusable launch vehicle (RLV) industry and the future of inexpensive flights to orbit?

The early Universe was a busy place some 13 billion years ago. That's when countless young galaxies began to evolve and birthed stars at a prodigious rate. The hearts of those very distant galaxies show turbulent, lumpy disks studded with even thicker clumps of dust and gas that spawned their huge batches of stars. Astronomers want to understand what's driving the clumping, so they've turned to recent surveys of closer galaxies in the "local Universe" that contain similar lumpy regions.

Last year, the European Space Agency (ESA) launched the Proba-3 mission to space. Comprised of two spacecraft, the Coronograph and the Occulter, it is a technology demonstrator designed to test techniques for highly-precise satellite formation flying that will pave the way for future multi-satellite missions. This past March, the two spacecraft performed a first-ever feat by flying in tandem for hours without help from mission controllers. They created an artificial solar eclipse in orbit and obtained their first images of the Sun's outer atmosphere (aka corona) in the process.

For years, astronomers have been searching for a mysterious ninth planet lurking in the dark outer reaches of our Solar System. Now, a team of researchers have taken a completely different approach to this cosmic detective story, instead of looking for reflected sunlight, they're hunting for the planet's own heat signature.

A team of astronomers has recently completed a long-range observation of a comet far from the Sun. This analysis proves that there’s lots going on, even in the icy depths of the solar system.

Regular matter is properly called baryonic matter. It's made of baryons, which are mostly protons and neutrons (but not electrons). Baryons make up the matter we interact with in everyday life, including our own bodies. Baryonic matter makes up about 5% of the Universe, while dark matter (27%) and dark energy (68%) make up the rest, according to the standard cosmological model, Lambda CDM.