Universe Today

December 6, 2024December 6, 2024 by Mark Thompson

Jared Isaacman is Trump’s Choice for NASA Administrator

As a new President of the United States is elected, the NASA administrator role is usually reviewed. With the election of Trump, a new administrator has been chosen, Jared Isaacman. He is a billionaire entrepreneur, an experienced jet pilot and has himself completed to private flights to space. He was also the first to complete a spacewalk during the Polaris Dawn mission. Isaacman replaces the outgoing administrator Bill Nelson, a former space shuttle astronaut and senator.

December 6, 2024December 6, 2024 by Carolyn Collins Petersen

NASA Pushes Human Moon Landing Back to 2027

Artist's rendering of the Starship HLS on the lunar surface. NASA has contracted with SpaceX to provide the lunar landing system. Credit: SpaceX — Artist's rendering of the Starship HLS on the Moon's surface. NASA has contracted with SpaceX to provide the lunar landing system. Credit: SpaceX

The Artemis moon landings are delayed again due to technical difficulties. This time, the problem is with the Orion spacecraft heat shield. NASA administrator Bill Nelson announced that the new landing dates are in April of 2026 for Artemis II and sometime in 2027 for the first human landing during the Artemis III mission.

December 6, 2024December 6, 2024 by Evan Gough

Advanced Civilizations Could be Indistinguishable from Nature

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Image Credit: SETI

Sometimes in science you have to step back and take another look at underlying assumptions. Sometimes its necessary when progress stalls. One of the foundational questions of our day concerns the Fermi Paradox, the contradiction between what seems to be a high probability of extraterrestrial life and the total lack of evidence that it exists.

What assumptions underlie the paradox?

December 5, 2024December 10, 2024 by Matt Williams

MAUVE: An Ultraviolet Astrophysics Probe Mission Concept

An illustration of the variations among the more than 5,000 known exoplanets discovered since the 1990s. Could their stars' metallicity play a role in making them habitable to life? Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

For the past thirty years, NASA’s Great Observatories – the Hubble, Spitzer, Compton, and Chandra space telescopes – have revealed some amazing things about the Universe. In addition to some of the deepest views of the Universe provided by the Hubble Deep Fields campaign, these telescopes have provided insight into the unseen parts of the cosmos – i.e., in the infrared, gamma-ray, and ultraviolet spectrums. With the success of these observatories and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), NASA is contemplating future missions that would reveal even more of the “unseen Universe.”

This includes the UltraViolet Explorer (UVEX), a space telescope NASA plans to launch in 2030 as its next Astrophysics Medium-Class Explorer mission. In a recent study, a team comprised of graduate students and postdocs from institutions across the US detailed a concept mission known as the Mission to Analyze the UltraViolet universE (MAUVE). This telescope and its sophisticated instruments were conceived during the inaugural NASA Astrophysics Mission Design School. According to the team’s paper, this mission would hypothetically be ready for launch by 2031.

December 5, 2024December 5, 2024 by Brian Koberlein

Cosmology is at a Crossroads, But New Instruments are Coming to Help

Illustration of the accelerating expansion of the universe. Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab

Our understanding of the Universe is profound. Only a century ago, astronomers held a Great Debate to argue over whether our galaxy was an island universe, or whether nebulae such as Andromeda were galaxies in a much larger cosmos. Now we know that the Universe is billions of years old, ever expanding to billions of light-years across, and filled with not just stars and galaxies but with dark energy and cold dark matter. Astronomers summarize this understanding as the LCDM model, which is the standard model of cosmology. While the observational data we have strongly supports this model, it is not without its challenges.

December 5, 2024December 5, 2024 by Andy Tomaswick

A 3U CubeSat Could Collect Data During an Asteroid Flyby

ESA's Asteroid Impact Mission is joined by two triple-unit CubeSats to observe the impact of the NASA-led Demonstration of Autonomous Rendezvous Technology (DART) probe with the secondary Didymos asteroid, planned for late 2022. Image: ESA

One of the great things about CubeSat designs is that they constrain the engineers who design them. Constraints are a great way to develop novel solutions to problems that might otherwise be ignored without them. As CubeSats become increasingly popular, more and more researchers are looking at how to get them to do more with less. A paper from 2020 contributes to that by designing a 3U CubeSat mission that weighs less than 4 kilograms to perform a fly-by of a Near Earth Asteroid (NEA) using entirely off-the-shelf parts.

December 4, 2024December 4, 2024 by Matt Williams

China Plans to Retrieve Mars Samples by 2031

The launch of the Tianwen-1 mission, Wenchang City, south China's Hainan Province, July 23, 2020. Credit: CFP

China’s growing presence in space has been undeniable since the turn of the century. Between sending the first “taikonaut” to space in 2003 (Yang Liwei), launching the first Chinese robotic mission to the Moon (Chang’e-1) in 2007, and the deployment of their Tiangong space station between 2021-2022, China has emerged as a major power in space. Accordingly, they have bold plans for the future, like the proposed expansion of their Tiangong space station and the creation of the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) by 2035.

In their desire to become a space power that can rival NASA, China also has its sights on Mars. In addition to crewed missions that will culminate in a “permanent base,” they intend to conduct a sample-return mission in the near future. This will be performed by the Tianwen-3 mission, which is currently scheduled to launch in 2028 and return samples to Earth by 2031. In a recent article, the Tianwen-3 science team outlined their exploration strategy, including the methods used to retrieve the samples, the target locations, and how they’ll be analyzed for biosignatures that could indicate the presence of past life.

December 4, 2024December 4, 2024 by Evan Gough

Here’s How Interstellar Objects and Rogue Planets Can be Trapped in the Solar System

Illustration of an interstellar object approaching our solar system. Credit: Rubin Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/J. daSilva

When Oumuamua traversed our Solar System in 2017 it was the first confirmed Interstellar Object (ISO) to do so. Then in 2019, Comet 2l/Borisov did the same thing. These are the only two confirmed ISOs to visit our Solar System. Many more ISOs must have visited in our Solar System’s long history, and many more will visit in the future. There are obviously more of these objects out there, and the upcoming Vera Rubin Observatory is expected to discover many more.

It’s possible that the Sun could capture an ISO or a rogue planet in the same way that some of the planets have captured moons.

It all comes down to phase space.

December 4, 2024December 5, 2024 by Brian Koberlein

MeerKAT Confirms the Gravitational Wave Background of the Universe in Record Time

A MeerKAT antenna disk in front of an illustrated view of black holes and gravitational waves. Credit: Carl Knox, OzGrav, Swinburne University of Technology and South African Radio Astronomy Observatory

The Universe is a turbulent place. Stars are exploding, neutron stars collide, and supermassive black holes are merging. All of these things and many more create gravitational waves. As a result, the cosmos is filled with a rippling sea of gravitational vibrations. While we have been able to directly detect gravitational waves since 2016, gravitational wave astronomy is still in its infancy. We have only been able to observe the gravitational ripples of colliding stellar black holes. Even then, all we can really detect is the final gravitational chirp created in the last moments of merging.

December 4, 2024December 4, 2024 by Andy Tomaswick

Could We Use An Asteroid to Shield Astronauts On Their Way to Mars?

Illustration of the asteroid Bennu. Credit: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Radiation is a primary concern for long-duration human spaceflight, such as the planned trips to Mars, which are the stated goal of organizations such as NASA and SpaceX. Shielding is the standard way to protect astronauts from radiation during those flights. However, shielding is heavy and, therefore, expensive when it is launched off the Earth. What if, instead, astronauts could hitch a ride on a giant mass of shielding already in space that will take them directly to their destination? That is the basic thought behind a paper from Victor Reshetnyk and his student at Taras Shevchenko National University in Kyiv.