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What a Misplaced Meteorite Told Us About Mars

11 million years ago, Mars was a frigid, dry, dead world, just like it is now. Something slammed into the unfortunate planet, sending debris into space. A piece of that debris made it to Earth, found its way into a drawer at Purdue University, and then was subsequently forgotten about. Until 1931, when scientists studied and realized it came directly from Mars. What has it told them about the red planet? 11 million years ago, the Himalayas were rising on a warmer, more humid Earth. Early ape species made their home in an Africa covered by tropical forests. Diverse mammal species roamed the continents. At the same time, on Mars, the frigid wind blew across a desiccated, forlorn world. The planet’s thin atmosphere is a weak barrier to meteorites, and the planet’s cratered surface bears witness to its nakedness. Some impacts were powerful enough to launch debris into space beyond the planet’s gravitational pull. The meteorite in the drawer is one such piece of debris. “Many meteoro
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SpIRIT CubeSat Demonstrates a Operational Gamma and X-Ray Detector

CubeSats are becoming more and more capable, and it seems like every month, another CubeSat is launched doing something new and novel. So far, technology demonstration has been one of the primary goals of those missions, though the industry is moving into playing an active role in scientific discovery. However, there are still some hurdles to jump before CubeSats have as many scientific tools at their disposal as larger satellites. That is where the Space Industry Responsive Intelligent Thermal (SpIRIT) CubeSat, the first from the Univeristy of Melbourne’s Space Lab, hopes to make an impact. Late in 2023, it launched with a few novel systems to operate new scientific equipment, and its leaders published a paper a few months ago detailing the progress of its mission so far. SpIRIT represents a first not only for the Melbourne Space Lab but also for Australia as a whole. Their space agency was first set up in 2018 and began funding the SpIRIT project in 2020, as the COVID pandemic star

Sun-Like Stars Around Black Holes: What Gives?

Buried in the treasure trove of the Gaia catalog were two strange black hole systems. These were black holes orbiting sun-like stars, a situation that astronomers long thought impossible. Recently a team has proposed a mechanism for creating these kinds of oddballs. The two black holes, dubbed BH1 and BH2, are each almost ten times the mass of the Sun. That’s not too unusual as black holes go, but what makes these systems strange is that they each have a companion star with roughly the same properties as the Sun. And those stars are orbiting on very wide orbits. The problem with this setup is that typically sun-like stars don’t survive the transition of a companion turning into a black hole. The end of a giant star’s life is generally violent. When they die, they tend to either eject their smaller companion from the system completely, or just outright swallow them. Either way, we don’t expect small stars to orbit black holes. But now researchers have a potential solution . They

Starship’s Booster (and Donald Trump) Make a Splash With Sixth Flight Test

SpaceX’s Starship launch system went through its sixth flight test today, and although the Super Heavy booster missed out on being caught back at its launch pad, the mission checked off a key test objective with President-elect Donald Trump in the audience. Trump attended the launch at SpaceX’s Starbase complex in the company of SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who has been serving as a close adviser to the once and future president over the past few months. In a pre-launch posting to his Truth Social media platform, Trump wished good luck to “Elon Musk and the Great Patriots involved in this incredible project.” President Trump has arrived to watch the SpaceX launch with @elonmusk ! ? pic.twitter.com/D5awPUUQTC — Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) November 19, 2024 Starship is the world’s most powerful rocket, with 33 methane-fueled Raptor engines providing more than 16 million pounds of thrust at liftoff. That’s twice the power of the Saturn V rocket that sent Americans to the moon in th

The Strange Pulsar at the Center of the Crab Nebula

Thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope, we all have a vivid image of the Crab Nebula emblazoned in our mind’s eyes. It’s the remnant of a supernova explosion Chinese astronomers recorded in 1056. However, the Crab Nebula is more than just a nebula; it’s also a pulsar. The Crab Pulsar pulsates in an unusual ‘zebra’ pattern, and an astrophysicist at the University of Kansas thinks he’s figured out why. When massive stars explode as supernovae, they leave behind remnants: either a stellar-mass black hole or a neutron star. SN 1054 left behind the latter. The neutron star is highly magnetized and spins rapidly, emitting beams of electromagnetic radiation from its poles. As it spins, the radiation is intermittently directed towards Earth, making it visible to us. In this case, it’s called a pulsar. Pulsars are complex objects. They’re extremely dense and can pack up to three solar masses of material into a sphere as small as 30 km in diameter. Their magnetic fields are millions of times

The Biggest Black Holes May Start From The Tiniest Seeds

The existence of gigantic black holes in the very early universe challenges our assumptions of how black holes form and grow. New research suggests that these monsters may have found their origins in the earliest epochs of the Big Bang. For years astronomers have been troubled by observations of fully grown supermassive black holes before the universe was even a billion years old. This is challenging because as far as we know the only way to make black holes is through the deaths of massive stars. And the only way for them to grow is either through mergers or the accumulation of material. Following these known mechanisms it’s extremely difficult to build the observed black holes, which have masses hundreds of millions of times that of the Sun, so quickly. And so astronomers have been long attempting to find some other way to explain how these giant black holes arrive on the cosmic scene. In a new paper , a team of researchers point to an seemingly unlikely scenario: the first micros

China’s Proposed Cargo Shuttle, the Haolong, Has Entered Development

The 2024 China International Aviation and Aerospace Exhibition was held in Zhuhai last week – from November 12th to 17th, 2024. Since 1996, and with support from the Chinese aerospace industry, this biennial festival features actual products, trade talks, technological exchanges, and an air show. This year’s big highlight was China’s newly announced reusable space cargo shuttle, the Haolong (Chinese for “dragon”). According to chief designer Fang Yuanpeng, the spacecraft has entered the engineering phase and will be ready for space in the near future. The Haolong shuttle is being developed by the Chengdu Aircraft Design and Research Institute , which has developed several Chinese fighter jets in the past. It has a large wingspan, measuring eight meters (26.25 ft) in width and about 10 meters (33 ft) long, with a high lift-to-drag ratio. From the image provided (above), the design is clearly inspired by the now-retired Space Shuttle and features the same type of payload bay with tw