Space and astronomy news
Mars haunts us as a vision of a planet gone wrong. It was once warm and wet, with rivers flowing across its surface and (potentially) simple life residing in its water bodies. Now it’s dry and freezing.
Could Earth suffer this fate? Are there innumerable other worlds throughout the Universe that were habitable for a period of time before becoming uninhabitable?
Continue reading “How Hydrogen Kept Early Mars Warm”
Sometimes, the best innovative ideas come from synthesizing two previous ones. We’ve reported before on the idea of having a balloon explore the atmosphere of Venus, and we closely watched the progress of the Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment (MOXIE) as part of the Perseverance rover on Mars. When you combine the two, you can solve many of the challenges facing balloon exploration of Venus’ upper atmosphere – the most habitable place in the solar system other than Earth. That is the plan for Dr. Michael Hecht, the principal investigator of the MOXIE system and professor at MIT, and his team for the Exploring Venus with Electrolysis (EVE) project, which recently received as NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Phase I grant as part of the 2025 NIAC awards.
Continue reading “A Balloon Mission That Could Explore Venus Indefinitely”
The study of asteroid samples is a highly lucrative area of research and one of the best ways to determine how the Solar System came to be. Given that asteroids are leftover material from the formation of the Solar System, they are likely to contain vital clues about how several key processes took place. This includes how water, organic molecules, and the building blocks of life were distributed throughout the Solar System billions of years ago. For this reason, space agencies have attached a high importance to the retrieval of asteroid samples that are returned to Earth for analysis.
This includes NASA’s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security–Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) mission. This spacecraft rendezvoused with asteroid (101955) Bennu on December 3rd, 2018, returning 121.6 grams of material (the largest sample ever) to Earth by September 2023. A recent analysis by scientists from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center revealed molecules key to life on Earth, including all five nitrogen bases – molecules required for building DNA and RNA. These findings support the theory that asteroids could have delivered the building blocks of life to Earth in the distant past.
Continue reading “The Building Blocks for Life Found in Asteroid Bennu Samples”
Though it’s a cold, dead planet, Mars still has its own natural beauty about it. This image shows us something we’ll never see on Earth.
Continue reading “These Bizarre Features on Mars are Caused by Carbon Dioxide Geysers”
What would you do for fun on another planet? Go ballooning in Venus’ atmosphere? Explore the caves of Hyperion? Hike all the way around Mercury? Ride a toboggan down the slopes of Pluto’s ice mountains? Or watch clouds roll by on Mars?
All those adventures, and more, are offered in a new book titled “Daydreaming in the Solar System.” But the authors don’t stop at daydreaming: York University planetary scientist John E. Moores and astrophysicist Jesse Rogerson also explain why the adventures they describe would be like nothing on Earth.
In the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast, Moores says the idea behind the book was to tell “a little story that is really, really true to what the science is, and then give the reader an idea of what science there is that actually enables that story to take place.”
When astronomers detected the first long-predicted gravitational waves in 2015, it opened a whole new window into the Universe. Before that, astronomy depended on observations of light in all its wavelengths.
We also use light to communicate, mostly radio waves. Could we use gravitational waves to communicate?
Continue reading “Communicating with Gravitational Waves”
To the casual observer, the Sun seems to be the one constant and never changing. The reality is that the Sun is a seething mass of plasma, electrically charged gas which is constantly being effected by the Sun’s magnetic field. The unpredictability of the activity on the Sun is one of the challenges that faces modern solar physicists. The impact of coronal mass ejections are one particular aspect that comes with levels of uncertainty of their impact. But machine learning algorithms could perhaps have given us more warning! A new paper suggests algorithms trained on decades of solar activity saw all the signs of increased activity from the region called AR13664 and perhaps can help with future outbursts.
New images from NASA’s Juno spacecraft make Io’s nature clear. It’s the most volcanically active world in the Solar System, with more than 400 active volcanoes. Juno has performed multiple flybys of Io, and images from its latest one show an enormous hotspot near the moon’s south pole.
Continue reading “Juno Sees a Massive Hotspot of Volcanic Activity on Io”
Comet G3 ATLAS wows southern hemisphere observers and Universe Today readers before it fades from view.
Comets are always a true celestial treat to track. In a clockwork cosmos, the appearance of a potentially bright new comet is always a celestial question mark: will it perform up to expectations, or fizzle from view? Such was the case with Comet C/2024 G3 ATLAS.
Continue reading “Requiem for a Comet: Amazing Reader Views of G3 ATLAS”
Novel propulsion systems are one of the most important ways to push space exploration forward – literally. Traditional propulsion systems, like chemical rockets, are good at getting spacecraft out of gravity wells but not so great at traveling in free space. More modern systems, like electric propulsion, are better at providing long-term propulsion but are very slow. Others haven’t even made it to space, like nuclear thermal rockets. But there’s one type that could trump them all – fusion propulsion. It has the benefit of significant thrust and excellent fuel efficiency and could open up the whole solar system in ways other systems could only dream of. One company, Helicity Space, thinks they are on the path to developing a working version of just such a fusion propulsion system, and they just received a NASA Institute of Advanced Concepts (NIAC) grant to continue its development.
Continue reading “Fusion-Enabled Comprehensive Exploration of the Heliosphere”