Space and astronomy news
In the beginning, the Universe was all primordial gas. Somehow, some of it was swept up into supermassive black holes (SMBHs), the gargantuan singularities that reside at the heart of galaxies. The details of how that happened and how SMBHs accumulate mass are some of astrophysics’ biggest questions.
Continue reading “Black Holes Dominate Large Regions of Space, But They’re Mysterious”
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.
Continue reading “CubeSat Propulsion Technologies are Taking Off”
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.
Continue reading “Swarms of Orbiting Sensors Could Map An Asteroid’s Surface”
Wherever the JWST looks in space, matter and energy are interacting in spectacular displays. The Webb reveals more detail in these interactions than any other telescope because it can see through dense gas and dust that cloak many objects.
In a new image, the JWST spots a young protostar only 100,000 years old.
Continue reading “Webb Sees a Star in the Midst of Formation”
Mercury puts on one of its best apparitions for 2024 this month.
Where have all of the planets gone? The late evening fall of dusk in early July also sees a sky seemingly vacant of familiar naked eye planets. Mars, Jupiter and Saturn are now denizens of dawn, and will stay that way for most of the remainder of 2024.
But two challenging planets are now emerging low to the west at dusk: Mercury and Venus. The two interior worlds are now mounting a slow return, as the hunt is now on the recover the two after sunset.
Continue reading “Meeting Mercury at Dusk in July”
After 100,000 orbits and almost 23 years on Mars, NASA’s Mars Odyssey orbiter has seen a lot. The spacecraft was sent to map ice and study its geology, but along the way, it’s captured more than 1.4 million images of the planet.
A recent image captured the Solar System’s tallest mountain and volcano, Olympus Mons.
Continue reading “A New View of Olympus Mons”
There have been many proposals for building structures on the Moon out of lunar regolith. But here’s an idea sure to resonate with creators, mechanical tinkerers, model builders and the kid inside us all.
What about using actual LEGO bricks?
Researchers ground up a 4.5-billion-year-old meteorite and used the dust to 3D print LEGO-style space bricks. They actually click together like the plastic variety, with so far only one downside: they only come in one color, grey.
Want to see some of these lunar LEGOs? LEGO will showcase the space bricks at some of its stores.
Continue reading “LEGO Bricks Printed out of Space Dust”
NASA’s InSight Mars Lander faced some challenges during its time on the red planet’s surface. Its mole instrument struggled to penetrate the compacted Martian soil, and the mission eventually ended when its solar panels were covered in dust. But some of its instruments performed well, including SEIS, the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure.
SEIS gathered Mars seismic data for more than four years, and researchers working with all of that data have determined a new meteorite impact rate for Mars.
Continue reading “Basketball-Sized Meteorites Strike the Surface of Mars Every Day”
As the New Horizons spacecraft continues its epic journey to explore the Kuiper Belt, it has a study partner back here on Earth. The Subaru Telescope on the Big Island of Hawaii is deploying its Hyper Suprime-Cam imager to look at the Kuiper Belt along the spacecraft’s trajectory. Its observations show that the Kuiper Belt extends farther than scientists thought.
Continue reading “More Evidence that the Kuiper Belt is Bigger Than We Thought”
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.
Continue reading “A Concentrated Beam of Particles and Photons Could Push Us to Proxima Centauri”