INFORMATION

It was an exciting time when, two weeks ago, SpaceX got the clearance it needed to conduct its first orbital flight test with the Starship and Super Heavy launch system. After years of waiting, SN flight tests, static fire tests, and stacking and unstacking, the long-awaited test of the SN24 Starship and BN7 Booster prototype was on! For this flight, SpaceX hoped to achieve an altitude of at least 150 km (90 mi) above sea level, crossing the 100 km (62 mi) threshold that officially marks the boundary of “space” (aka. the Karman Line) and making a partial transit around the world before splashing down off the coast of Hawaii. Unfortunately, things began to go awry a few minutes into the flight as the Starship prototype failed to separate from the booster, sending the rocket into a spin that ended in an explosion. While Musk and SpaceX issued statements that the test was largely successful and lots of valuable data was obtained, residents and environmental researchers claim the exp...

Last week, NASA shared a blog post saying they detected a sensor glitch associated with the James Webb Space Telescope’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI). For some reason, the sensor for MIRI’s Medium Resolution Spectroscopy (MRS) is receiving less light than expected at the longest wavelengths. NASA is investigating the cause, and said that the instrument is not at risk and no effect has been seen for images taken by MIRI. According to agency officials, all other modes of JWST and MIRI remain unaffected, and they are searching for the underlying issue. The glitch was found this month during regular calibration and monitoring of the telescope’s performance. NASA said they routinely monitor all 17 observing modes of the telescope and when they compared the brightness of standard stars that have been well-cataloged by other observatories to what MIRI was receiving, team members noticed a discrepancy in the data. They also compared how MIRI’s spectroscopy mode is working now versus ho...

Supernovae are incredibly common in the universe. Based on observations of isotopes such as aluminum-26 , we know that a supernova occurs on average about every fifty years in the Milky Way alone. A supernova can outshine a galaxy, so you wouldn’t want your habitable planet to be a few light years away when it goes off. Fortunately, most supernovae have occurred very far away from Earth, so we haven’t had to concern ourselves with wearing sunscreen at night. But it does raise an interesting question. When it comes to supernovae, how close is too close? As a recent study shows, the answer depends on the type of supernova. There is geological evidence that supernovae have occurred quite close to Earth in the past. The isotope iron-60 has a half-life of just 2.6 million years, and it has been found in ocean floor sediment laid down about 2 million years ago. It has also been found in Antarctic ice cores and lunar regolith, suggesting a supernova event around that time. Samples of Earth’...

A lunar lander built and operated by ispace , a Japanese startup, descended to the surface of the moon today after a months-long journey — but went out of contact and was presumed lost. “We have to assume that we could not complete the landing on the lunar surface,” ispace CEO Takeshi Hakamada said during a webcast of the Hakuto-R mission’s final stages. Ground controllers at the Hakuto-R Mission Control Center in Tokyo continued trying to re-establish communications nevertheless, and Hakamada said his company would try again. “We are very proud of the fact that we have achieved many things during this Mission 1,” he said. “We will keep going. Never quit the lunar quest.” Hakuto-R — which takes its name from the Japanese word for a mythical white rabbit that lives on the moon — tested the technologies and procedures for commercial deliveries to the lunar surface. The refrigerator-sized robotic probe was sent into space in December aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and traced a...

NASA has a long history of crowdsourcing solutions, seeking input from the public, entrepreneurs, and citizen scientists. Currently, the agency is tasked with preparing for the long-awaited return to the Moon (the Artemis Program) and addressing the growing problem of Climate Change. The former entails all manner of requirements, from launch vehicles and human-rated spacecraft to logistical concerns and payload services. The latter calls for advances in climate science, Earth observation, and high-quality data collection. To enlist the help of entrepreneurs in addressing these challenges, NASA’s Science Mission Directorate (SMD) has once again teamed up with the world-leading crowdsourcing platform HeroX to launch the NASA Entrepreneurs Challenge . With a total prize purse of $1,000,000, NASA is looking for ideas to develop and commercialize state-of-the-art technology and data usage that advances lunar exploration and climate science. The challenge launched on April 10th and will ru...

The Ingenuity chopper on Mars is the little helicopter that just keeps on going. It’s doing that, even as it takes on flights over some pretty tough ground on the Red Planet. On April 13, Ingenuity made its 50th flight of the mission, 45 more than it was originally scheduled to do. During the April 13th trip, the little chopper flew 322.2 meters in 145.7 seconds. It also went up 18 meters—a new altitude record. At the end of the flight, Ingenuity settled down near Belva Crater. It’s all an amazing achievement and the mission is ready to do more. “Just as the Wright brothers continued their experiments well after that momentous day at Kitty Hawk in 1903, the Ingenuity team continues to pursue and learn from the flight operations of the first aircraft on another world,” said Lori Glaze, director of the Planetary Science Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. Where to Next? The next flight for the chopper is a “repositioning” trip to put it in the right place for the next set o...

Amateur astrophotography is becoming increasingly popular among the astronomy community, as advancements in telescope and camera technologies allow individuals from all walks of life to observe the heavens in mind-blowing detail, including our own Sun, albeit with the proper protective equipment. This was recently demonstrated by Andrew McCarthy (Twitter @AJamesMcCarthy ), who owns and operates Cosmic Background Studios , and is originally from Northern California but currently resides in Florence, Arizona. On March 18, 2023, McCarthy tweeted a video of what appeared to be a tornado on the Sun’s surface. While this feature doesn’t look that big, McCarthy provides a stack of 14 Earths for scale within the video to show the gargantuan size of this tornado-like monstrosity. But while tornadoes are commonplace on Earth, what’s happening on the Sun’s surface to create such a unique phenomenon? “This is a solar prominence in the sun’s chromosphere,” McCarthy recently told Universe Today ...

Our planet hasn’t always been the warm, inviting place we know today. At least five times in its history, Earth froze over, locked in the grip of an ice age. Scientists sometimes refer to these periods as “Snowball Earth.” The popular idea is that everything was covered with ice, making life difficult, if not impossible. But, there’s new evidence that during at least one of these icy periods, parts of Earth’s surface could have been more like a giant mushy ball of slush. Geologists are studying rock cores that contain material laid down on the ocean bottom during a period called the Marinoan Ice Age. It occurred some 635 million years ago during a geologic period called, appropriately enough, the Cryogenian. The Marinoan event was extreme. Over the course of 15 million years, it slathered much of the planet with ice. “We called this ice age ‘Snowball Earth,’” said Thomas Algeo, a professor of geosciences at the University of Cincinnati’s College of Arts and Sciences and part of a te...

Some parts of the solar system are exceptionally hard to reach. Despite the interesting scientific data we could collect from that location, we’ve never managed to send a probe to one of the poles of the Sun. Nor have we been able to send many spacecraft to exciting places in the Oort cloud of other parts of the outer solar system. Voyager 1, which currently holds the record for being the farthest craft away from Earth, took over 40 years to reach the point where it is now. Even if it did pass by something interesting on its way, its antiquated scientific equipment would be less useful than more modern technology. Cost is one of the main bottlenecks for a lack of exploratory missions to these parts of the solar system. Large-scale missions like Voyager and New Horizons cost hundreds of millions of dollars and take decades to plan. A smaller, cheaper, and more flexible option to get a spacecraft to these hard-to-reach places would be invaluable. Enter the Sundiver concept. Perhaps nam...

Astronomers are currently searching for signs of life in the “habitable zones” of nearby stars, which is defined as the band around a star where liquid water can potentially exist. But a recent paper argues that we need to take a more nuanced and careful approach, based not on the potential for life, but the potential for computation. One way to define life itself is as a set of computations that act on information. The information is stored in DNA and the computations are performed by various proteins. The ability to store information and act on its environment allows life to undergo natural selection, which finds ever more complex arrangements. The traditional searches for life look at how we understand it from an earthly context . Namely, creatures living on the surface of a world just the right distance from a parent star and using liquid water as a solvent for chemical reactions. But it’s easy to imagine much more complex and varied forms of life out there in the universe. Life...

There’s an interesting problem in exoplanet studies: how to tell if a planet has a magnetosphere. It’s not like we can visibly see it unless we find a different way of looking. A pair of scientists may have found one. They used radio telescopes to track emissions given off by magnetic star-planet interactions. These happen when a planet with a magnetic field plows through star stuff caught its star’s magnetic field. Sebastian Pineda (the University of Colorado Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics) and Jackie Villadsen (Bucknell University) used the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array to search for those emissions at a star called YZ Ceti and its planet, YZ Ceti b. Over the course of several observation runs, they found a repeating radio signal from the star. It was a first. “I’m seeing this thing that no one has seen happen before,” said Villadsen, describing the moment she first isolated the radio signal while pouring over data at her home on a weekend. “We saw the initial bu...

New in-space propulsion techniques seem to be popping out of the woodwork. The level of innovation behind moving things around in space is astounding, and now a company from Japan has just hit a significant milestone. Pale Blue, which I assumed was named as a nod to a beloved Carl Sagan book, recently successfully tested their in-orbit water-based propulsion system, adding yet another safe, affordable propulsion system to satellite designers’ repertoires.  Using water to jet around space might seem relatively simplistic. However, despite its simplicity and relatively low cost, water jets for satellite propulsion systems have not yet been widely adopted. This first Pale Blue system, which launched with Sony’s EYE satellite as part of its STAR SPHERE program to take pictures of the Earth, was the first time the company successfully tested its system in space. They did so by operating it for approximately two minutes in early March and adjusting the EYE satellite’s orbit in LEO. Th...

A while back, we reported on a research group that was using an interesting mix of materials to create concrete on Mars. The University of Manchester researchers used blood and urine to create concrete bricks using Martian regolith stronger than concrete used on Earth. However, there was an obvious downside of literally requiring blood to make them, let alone the side effects of having astronauts potentially live in a building built partially out of their own bodily fluids. So the researchers thought up a different material whose usefulness in space will be familiar to anyone who has read Andy Weir’s most famous novel – potatoes. Potatoes bring a lot of benefits to space exploration. Most importantly, they’re an extremely efficient and stable source of calories. But their starch can also be used as a binder when making concrete. Specifically, it can bind together materials, such as Martian or Lunar regolith, to create something akin to what we would typically consider concrete. The ...

In the coming decade, NASA and China plan to send the first crewed missions (astronauts and taikonauts) to Mars. Both agencies hope to begin sending missions by 2033, coinciding with a Mars Opposition, followed by additional missions in 2035, 2037, and after. These missions will culminate with the creation of a Mars surface habitat that will enable future missions and research. Launch opportunities for these missions are limited because the distances between Earth and Mars vary considerably over time, ranging from about 56 million km (~35 million mi) to more than 400 million km (250 million mi). The times when Earth and Mars are at their closest (known as a Mars Opposition ) only occur once every 26 months. Moreover, using conventional propulsion methods, it takes missions six to nine months to travel between Earth and Mars. As a result, round-trip missions to Mars could take up to three years, dramatically increasing radiation exposure for the crew and the time they spend in microg...