Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (NASA-JPL) are busy keeping the Perseverance rover and Ingenuity helicopter functioning in Jezero Crater on Mars while these robotic explorers continue the search for ancient microbial life on the Red Planet. But some of those same engineers have also been busy working with LEGO designers on new one-tenth-scale LEGO Technic buildable models of these very same robotic explorers with the goal of inspiring the next generation of NASA scientists and engineers.
Continue reading “NASA and LEGO Continue Brick-Solid Partnership with Perseverance and Ingenuity LEGO Models”The Mars Sample Return Mission is Starting to Look Expensive
We say it all the time here at UT – getting to space is hard. It’s even more hard to do new and interesting things in space. And when projects get hard, that usually means they cost more money. That is certainly the case for one of the most anticipated missions on NASA’s current docket – the Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission. And it’s not looking like it’s going to get any easier anytime soon.
Continue reading “The Mars Sample Return Mission is Starting to Look Expensive”How Close Can a Planet Get to a Star and Still Be Habitable?
In exoplanetology, the ring around the star is often called the “Goldilocks zone,” in reference to the 19th-century fairy tale Goldilocks and the Three Bears. In that story, Goldilocks encounters sets of three objects that are either too extreme for her liking or just right. In the case of a bowl of porridge, the three are too hot, too cold, and just right, hence the analogy to an exoplanet’s position around its star. If it’s too close to its parent star, the planet is too hot, and liquid water, the necessary ingredient for life, won’t exist. If it’s too far, the planet is too cold, and the only water on its surface will be ice. But even the “just right” category has some wiggle room. Many planetary scientists consider Venus to be on the inner edge of our star’s “just right” habitable zone. So why did it end up with such a different fate than our pale blue dot? A team of researchers, led by Lisa Kaltenegger at Cornell, think they have found a way to answer that question – by turning the world’s most powerful space telescope towards a star about 100 light years away and directly observing an exoplanet’s atmosphere.
Continue reading “How Close Can a Planet Get to a Star and Still Be Habitable?”A Feline in the Heavens: The Smiling Cat Nebula
A stellar nursery sounds like a placid place where baby stars go about their business undisturbed. But, of course, a stellar nursery is nothing like that. (Babies are noisy and cry a lot.) They’re dynamic places where powerful elemental forces rage mightily and bend the surroundings to their will. And this one, even though its name is the drowsy-sounding Smiling Cat Nebula, is no exception.
Continue reading “A Feline in the Heavens: The Smiling Cat Nebula”That New Car Smell… But for Planets
Remember how a new car smells? It’s a chemical signature of all the materials used to make the car’s interior. What if you could use chemical signatures to learn about newborn planets?
Continue reading “That New Car Smell… But for Planets”Two New Space Telescopes Will Bring Dark Energy Into Focus
Since the 1990s, thanks to observations by the venerable Hubble Space Telescope (HST), astronomers have contemplated the mystery of cosmic expansion. While scientists have known about this since the late-1920s and early-30s, images acquired by Hubble‘s Ultra Deep Fields campaign revealed that the expansion has been accelerating for the past six billion years! This led scientists to reconsider Einstein’s theory that there is an unknown force in the Universe that “holds back gravity,” which he named the Cosmological Constant. To astronomers and cosmologists today, this force is known as “Dark Energy.”
However, not everyone is sold on the idea of Dark Energy, and some believe that cosmic expansion could mean there is a flaw in our understanding of gravity. In the near future, scientists will benefit from next-generation space telescopes to provide fresh insight into this mysterious force. These include the ESA’s Euclid mission, scheduled for launch this July, and NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (RST), the direct successor to Hubble that will launch in May 2027. Once operational, these space telescopes will investigate these competing theories to see which holds up.
Continue reading “Two New Space Telescopes Will Bring Dark Energy Into Focus”What Would the Milky Way Look Like From Afar?
Our understanding of galaxies is rooted in the fact that we can see so many of them. Some, such as the Andromeda and Pinwheel galaxies are fairly close, and others are more distant, but all of them give a unique view. Because of this, we can see how the various types of galaxies appear from different points of view, from face-on to edge-on and all angles in between. But there is one galaxy that’s a bit harder to map out, and that’s our own. Because we are in the galactic plane of the Milky Way, it can be difficult to create an accurate bird’s-eye view of our home galaxy. That’s where a recent study in Nature Astronomy comes in.
Continue reading “What Would the Milky Way Look Like From Afar?”UK Professor Granted JWST Observation Time to Study Jupiter’s Upper Atmosphere
A professor from Northumbria University in the North East region of England has been granted telescope time with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) later this year to study Jupiter’s upper atmosphere, also known as its ionosphere. Being granted such access to JWST is extremely competitive which makes getting access to use its powerful instruments to study the cosmos a very high honor.
Continue reading “UK Professor Granted JWST Observation Time to Study Jupiter’s Upper Atmosphere”AI Could Help Astronomers Rapidly Generate Hypotheses
Almost anywhere you go on the internet, it seems nearly impossible to escape articles on AI. Even here at UT, we’ve published several. Typically they focus on how a specific research group leveraged the technology to make sense of reams of data. But that sort of pattern recognition isn’t all that AI is good for. In fact, it’s becoming pretty capable of abstract thought. And one place where abstract thought can be helpful is in developing new scientific theories. With that thought in mind, a team of researchers from ESA, Columbia, and the Australian National University (ANU) utilized an AI to come up with scientific hypotheses in astronomy.
Continue reading “AI Could Help Astronomers Rapidly Generate Hypotheses”Another Key Molecule for Life Found in Space by JWST
The search for life is an incredibly evocative driver of cosmic exploration. It captures our imagination to think that there might be living things out there somewhere else. That’s one reason why we point our eyes—and telescopes—to the stars.
Continue reading “Another Key Molecule for Life Found in Space by JWST”