Andy Tomaswick, Author at Universe Today

July 15, 2024July 15, 2024 by Andy Tomaswick

A Walking Balloon Could One Day Explore Titan – Or Earth’s Sea Floor

Novel ways to move on other celestial bodies always draw the attention of the space exploration community. Here at UT, we’ve reported on everything from robots that suspend themselves from the walls of Martian caves to robots that hop using jets of locally mined gas. But we haven’t yet reported on the idea of a balloon that “walks.” But that is the idea behind the BALloon Locomotion for Extreme Terrain, or BALLET, a project from Hari Nayar, a Principal Roboticist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and his colleagues.

July 12, 2024July 12, 2024 by Andy Tomaswick

A Hopping Robot Could Explore Europa Using Locally Harvested Water

Various forms of hopping robots have crept into development for us[e in different space exploration missions. We’ve reported on their use on asteroids and even our own Moon. But a study funded by NASA’s Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) in 2018 planned a mission to a type of world where hopping may not be as noticeable an advantage—Europa.

July 11, 2024July 11, 2024 by Andy Tomaswick

Exoplanet Could be an Enormous Version of Europa

Certain exoplanets pique scientists’ interest more than others. Some of the most interesting are those that lie in the habitable zone of their stars. However, not all of those planets would be similar to Earth – in fact, finding a planet about the size of Earth is already stretching the limits of most exoplanet-hunting telescopes. So the scientific community rejoiced when researchers at the Université de Montréal announced they found an exoplanet in the size range of the Earth. However, it appears to be almost entirely covered in water, making it more similar to a giant version of Europa, the ice-covered moon of Jupiter.

July 10, 2024July 10, 2024 by Andy Tomaswick

Webb Detects the Smell of Rotten Eggs in an Exoplanet’s Atmosphere

Studying the atmospheres of exoplanets is helpful for several reasons. Sometimes, it helps in understanding their formation. Sometimes, it helps define whether the planet might be habitable. And sometimes, you allow a press officer to write the headline “Stench of a gas giant? Nearby exoplanet reeks of rotten eggs.” That headline was released by John Hopkins University’s (JHU) press department after a study describing the atmosphere of one of the nearest known “hot Jupiters” was recently published in Nature.

July 9, 2024July 9, 2024 by Andy Tomaswick

NASA Imagines a Catastrophic Asteroid Impact to Study How to Prevent it

The Netflix movie Don’t Look Up received plenty of accolades for its scarily realistic portrayal of a professor from Michigan State University attempting to warn the world about a civilization-ending asteroid impact. In reality, there are plenty of organizations in the US government and beyond whose job it is to find and avoid those impacts. And the best way to train them to do those jobs is to run scenarios and try to determine what actions would need to be taken. That was the idea behind the fifth Planetary Defense Interagency Tabletop Exercise, held at John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in April. NASA recently released a preliminary report on the results of the exercise, with a fully detailed one to come in August.

July 8, 2024July 8, 2024 by Andy Tomaswick

A Handy Attachment Could Make Lunar Construction a Breeze

Moving large amounts of regolith is a requirement for any long-term mission to the Moon or Mars. But so far, humanity has only sent systems capable of moving small amounts of soil at a time – primarily for sample collection. Sending a large, dedicated excavator to perform such work might be cost-prohibitive due to its weight, so why not send a bulldozer attachment to a mobility unit already planned for use on the surface? That was the thought process of an interdisciplinary team of engineers from NASA and the Colorado School of Mines. They came up with the Lunar Attachment Node for Construction and Excavation – or LANCE.

July 5, 2024July 5, 2024 by Andy Tomaswick

CubeSat Propulsion Technologies are Taking Off

Two cubesats communicated and then maneuvered towards one another in a recent technology demonstration. Image Credit: NASA

CubeSats are becoming ever more popular, with around 2,400 total launched so far. However, the small size limits their options for fundamental space exploration technologies, including propulsion. They become even more critical when mission planners design missions that require them to travel to other planets or even asteroids. A team from Khalifa University of Science and Technology in Abu Dhabi recently released a review of the different Cubesat propulsion technologies currently available – let’s look at their advantages and disadvantages.

July 5, 2024July 5, 2024 by Andy Tomaswick

Swarms of Orbiting Sensors Could Map An Asteroid’s Surface

It seems like every month, a new story appears announcing the discovery of thousands of new asteroids. Tracking these small body objects from ground and even space-based telescopes helps follow their overall trajectory. But understanding what they’re made of is much more difficult using such “remote sensing” techniques. To do so, plenty of projects get more up close and personal with the asteroid itself, including one from Dr. Sigrid Elschot and her colleagues from Stanford, which was supported by NASA’s Institute for Advanced Concepts back in 2018. It uses an advanced suite of plasma sensors to detect an asteroid’s surface composition by utilizing a unique phenomenon – meteoroid impacts.

July 3, 2024July 3, 2024 by Andy Tomaswick

A Concentrated Beam of Particles and Photons Could Push Us to Proxima Centauri

Getting to Proxima Centauri b will take a lot of new technologies, but there are increasingly exciting reasons to do so. Both public and private efforts have started seriously looking at ways to make it happen, but so far, there has been one significant roadblock to the journey – propulsion. To solve that problem, Christopher Limbach, now a professor at the University of Michigan, received a grant from NASA’s Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) to work on a novel type of beamed propulsion that utilizes both a particle beam and a laser to overcome that technology’s biggest weakness.

July 2, 2024July 2, 2024 by Andy Tomaswick

Could We Replace Ingenuity With a Swarm of Robotic Bees?

Humans finally achieved controlled flight on another planet for the first time just a few years ago. Ingenuity, the helicopter NASA sent to Mars, performed that difficult task admirably. It is now taking a well-deserved rest until some intrepid human explorer someday comes by to pick it up and hopefully put it in a museum somewhere. But what if, instead of a quadcopter, NASA used a series of flexible-wing robots akin to bees to explore the Martian terrain? That was the idea behind the Marsbee proposal by Chang-Kwon Kang and his colleagues at the University of Alabama at Huntsville. The project was supported by a NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) grant back in 2018 – let’s see what they did with it.