Andy Tomaswick

Recent Articles

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  China Postpones the Chang’e-7 Mission

  September 08, 2026

  We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again - space is hard. Another example, albeit lacking in the destructive displays of some past examples, is China’s recent delay of its Chang’e-7 lunar mission. The agency announced the mission would miss its late-August launch window with a very brief press release from the China National Space Administration and the China Manned Space Engineering Office. While that means a slight delay in China’s plan for the Moon, it’s only a matter of time before the cornerstone of the robotic lunar exploration program is back on the launch pad.

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  Snapping the Sun's Grand Magnetic Border at 0.3 AU

  September 06, 2026

  Out in the solar system, there is a giant rippling curtain of charged particles that is actually the largest structure in our solar system. Known as the Heliospheric Current Sheet (HCS), it marks the spot where the sun flips its magnetic north and south poles, and grows directly out of giant, glowing loops of plasma on its surface called helmet streamers. However, so far, studies of it have only occurred near Earth, using space-based instruments such as SoHo and Wind. But now, a new paper from Keiichi Ogasawara of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and his team used the joint ESA/NASA mission Solar Orbiter to capture the HCS at only about ⅓ the distance to Earth - before interactions with interstellar space and the solar wind change it. In other words, this paper represents the clearest ever picture of what the solar system’s largest coherent structure is actually made out of.

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  Scientists Develop Test Setup For New Way To Survive Reentry

  September 02, 2026

  Spacecraft famously have small bits of them disintegrate on reentry. That’s by design, as it is one of the easiest solutions to absorbing the incredible amounts of energy they experience. However, it also results in long turn around times while these heat shields are repaired, and the shields themselves act as “dead weight” limiting payload capacity. With the increased focus on reusable rockets, and the emphasis on payload capacity, engineers have been looking for alternative solutions to the reentry problem - and the one of the most promising is known as magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) braking. A new paper from researchers at the Tokyo Metropolitan University describes a new test setup that should help designers of these advanced braking systems truly capture what their system is doing upon reentry.

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  SuperCDMS SNOLAB Starts Its Dark Matter Hunt

  September 02, 2026

  The search for dark matter has reached another milestone - in this case the start of science for one of the world’s newest detectors. The Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (SuperCDMS) SNOLAB just began its scientific operations in Ontario, and over the course of the next few years, hope to find direct evidence of “light” dark matter for the first time.

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  Astronomers Might Use Manganese to Clock the Age of Galaxies

  September 02, 2026

  Keeping track of time in the universe is a difficult task. It’s constantly evolving and changing, and studying events that happened billions of years ago, while possible, isn’t exactly easy. A recent paper in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society from astronomers at The Ohio State University has unlocked a whole new way to tell time in space by using a new, perhaps unexpected element - manganese.

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  Scientists Model the True Darkness of Venus’s Mysterious UV Absorber

  September 01, 2026

  As any amateur astronomer can tell you, Venus is famous for its yellow coloration in visible light. But, ask a professional planetary scientist and they will tell you the strangest thing about Venus is how it appears in ultraviolet. In this spectrum, stark, high-contrast streaks are splattered across the planet’s cloud cover, and rotate on its four-day atmospheric rotation period. For over 100 years, scientists have wondered what could be causing those patterns, referring to an unknown “UV absorber”. A new paper, published in Astrobiology from Jan Spacek and an international team of researchers, hopes to answer that long-standing question by answering a simpler one - if you scooped Venus’ clouds into a test tube, how dark would they be?

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  Looking for Earth 2.0 in Binary Systems

  August 31, 2026

  While astronomers have found thousands of exoplanets over the last few decades, the true prize continues to elude them - they have yet to find an Earth-mass, rocky planet orbiting in the habitable zone of a Sun-like star. That’s partially just due to cosmic geography - around half of all sun-like stars near us aren’t alone. They have one or more companion stars that complicate their orbital dynamics, as well as those of any planets they might host. But a new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv, suggests a new NASA Small Explorer mission called Searching for Habitable Exoplanets with Relative Astrometry (SHERA), which aims to use those complex dynamics to help find Earth-sized worlds in these multi-star systems.

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  High-Orbit Laser Satellites Could Guide Future Lunar Travelers

  August 31, 2026

  Cislunar space is already getting crowded. And with that crowding comes infrastructure complications. One is navigation - there is no Global Positioning System available when you're not on the globe. Finding a spacecraft’s exact orbital path relies on networking with the Deep Space Network (DSN), a set of telescopes originally developed in the 1950s to communicate with spacecraft far afield. DSN itself is already getting overwhelmed with managing all of the missions requesting its time, so getting a precise orbital location currently can take hours. But researchers at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory think they might have a solution for this - launching a fleet of three satellites to collectively create a deep-space navigational system known as the LIght High-Orbit Utility Signal Emitter - LightHOUSE.

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  Scientists Melted A Diamond and Cracked a Secret of Ice Giants

  August 26, 2026

  Some of the strangest weather in the solar system doesn’t happen on Earth, or even Jupiter’s Great Red Spot - it happens in the interior of the Ice Giants like Neptune and Uranus. Specifically, scientists have long believed that, at certain pressure and temperatures, it literally rains diamonds inside of these planets. And for the first time, scientists have mimicked the process they believe creates that. A new paper by physicists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), published in Nature Physics, resolves a 20 year old scientific mystery, and shows how the same physics that makes it rain diamonds inside Neptune could also help us triple our fusion energy output.

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  NASA Highlights Next-Gen Cargo Landers Paving the Way for a Moon Base

  August 23, 2026

  NASA and its commercial partners are making progress on their way to a permanent human presence on the Moon. As part of that, a recent press release and accompanying YouTube video hints they may be looking to provide regular updates to the progress of those efforts - and, at least for this first one, that progress looks pretty good.

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  Are Mega-Constellations Sleepwalking Low Earth Orbit into Runaway Chaos?

  August 19, 2026

  It seems the overwhelming majority of the time when we write about satellite megaconstellations, it’s as a warning. That’s not because they aren’t useful, but because they hold the potential to completely destroy our access to space if not managed properly, and possibly cause a whole bunch of Earth-based devastation as well. So it probably won’t come as a surprise when there is yet another paper from a leading expert on space debris pointing out the potential hazards of the latest crop of satellite megaconstellations - which is exactly what a new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv by Hugh G. Lewis of the University of Birmingham, does.

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  Racing to Build a Radio Telescope on the Moon

  August 19, 2026

  Remember the “Wow!” signal? That high energy radio signature happened in 1977, when the Earth was much “quieter” in the radio band. If it were to happen today, it probably wouldn’t even move the needle on the background noise of human radio chatter. Signals from satellites, radar, and other human technology have crowded out extraterrestrial radio signals, limiting our ability to monitor the heavens for signals like the still unexplained one received in 1977. What’s more, the ionosphere partially blocks lower frequency radio signals, making them even harder to see from the ground. So, for a long time, scientists and engineers have been proposing putting a radio telescope on one of the last spots in the solar system that is safe from our ever growing sphere of radio influence - the far side of the Moon. A new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv from lead author David DeBoer of the University of Oxford and his co-authors, lays out a plan to do just that - and stresses that we need to do it before even that last safe haven is gone for good.

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  JWST Peeks at Callisto’s Ancient Scars

  August 18, 2026

  Of Jupiter’s four Galilean moons, Callisto is the one that gets the least attention. Io is constantly being resurfaced by volcanoes. Europa has a giant liquid water ocean. And Ganymede has its own magnetic field that interacts with its parent planet in weird ways. Callisto, by comparison, seems sedate, with its ancient, crater-saturated surface seemingly frozen in time. But new data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) shows that even this most benign of the Big Four moons is more active than previously realized.

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  A Quantum Trick for Spotting Gravitational Waves

  August 18, 2026

  Gravitational wave astronomy has seen plenty of improvements since the original signal was captured in 2015. Despite that, it remains an engineering challenge to actually create the detectors needed for the precise measurements that gravitational waves require. A new NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) grant is funding a concept from a team led by Paul Stankus at Brookhaven National Laboratory that could potentially solve some of those engineering problems - by using quantum mechanics.

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  Nuking An Asteroid on Short Notice Could Save Us

  August 17, 2026

  Readers of a certain age will remember a golden area of asteroid films, capstoned by two with very different endings. Deep Impact engrained the devastating consequences of letting a large piece of rock hit our planet, whereas Armageddon, though arguably the more kitschy of the two films, was an uplifting story about technical ingenuity and sacrifice. And now, the central crux of that movie’s storyline - essentially blasting an asteroid with a nuclear detonation - is taking center stage as our last line of defense against a potential Deep Impact scenario. A new paper from researchers at the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology, and published in Space: Science & Technology, describes two potential scenarios examining how we might actually be able to nuke a space rock - and whether it would actually save us.

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  Earth's Magnetosphere Might Not Protect Us From Superstorms After All

  August 14, 2026

  Science seems like a straightforward endeavour. You come up with a hypothesis, collect data to prove or disprove it, and analyze that data to see if the hypothesis is right. But anyone who actually does science will tell you many times it’s not that straightforward. And one of the most common complexities is in data analysis. A new paper suggests that one such complexity, known as regression to the mean, might be causing us to massively underestimate how severe solar storms can truly be.

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  NASA Wants to Float Microscopic 'Tracers' on Sunlight to Map the Edge of Space

  August 13, 2026

  The atmospheric is a dynamic place, and just how well we understand that dynamism depends on what part of the atmosphere it is. Low altitudes can be reached by traditional balloons, with full suites of sensing equipment. Higher reaches are the domain of satellites, with their zippy orbits allowing them to travel through the less dense regions. But there a section scientists call the “ignorosphere”, between 30-100 kilometers up that still plays a major role in global climate dynamics, but which are only able to reach with temporary sounding rockets that only collect data for a few minutes before falling back to Earth. But a new technology from Benjamin Schafer of Rarefied Technologies that received a NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) grant hopes to solve that problem by inserting a fleet of sensors that can float in that area for months, while providing insight to these hard-to-capture long-term patterns that influence weather everywhere on the globe.

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  Robots Could Build Massive Metamaterial Radars in Orbit

  August 11, 2026

  Tracking the debris orbiting at high velocity in space is only going to get harder over time. We have ground-based radar systems, such as the Space Fence, designed to detect pieces down to around 10 cm. But finding objects smaller than that, which can still cause a lot of damage traveling at 17,000 miles per hour, requires completely new thinking. One potential solution is a new idea from Dr. David Smith of Duke University, who was recently funded for a NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Phase I grant to build robotically assembled electromagnetic metamaterials for long-range space situational awareness.

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  NASA Funds 'Interworld Slingshot' Concept to Map Solar System Resources

  August 11, 2026

  In-situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) is going to be a critical technical component of any human expansion out into the solar system. Our first challenge with utilizing those resources, though, is finding them. We know how, at least in theory - send a probe to an asteroid, or a particular part of the Moon, and take a sample, maybe analyze that sample with some spectrographs, or send it back to Earth to be poked and prodded. The problem with this methodology is simple - it’s expensive. Sending dedicated probes to every near-Earth asteroid, or every potentially interesting site near a lunar base is prohibitively expensive. So a new NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) grant explores a different opportunity - using a single, relatively small spacecraft to visit multiple ISRU locations, and figure out their composition from tens of kilometers away.

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  NASA Wants to Toss 10,000 Tiny Probes Directly Into Saturn's Rings

  July 31, 2026

  Cassini, NASA’s last major mission to Saturn, famously plunged to its fiery death in the gas giant’s atmosphere at the end of its mission. It had captured more accurate in-situ data of the Saturnian system than any mission before or since. But there’s one particular part that it couldn’t directly approach - Saturn’s rings. But NASA very obviously wants to take a nice up-close look at them, as they have recently funded a NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Phase I grant to send a swarm of 10,000 highly expendable “femtosatellites” to get up close and personal with the most spectacular rings in our solar system.