INFORMATION

Any satellite sent to space must be able to deal with the battle with Earth’s gravitational pull, withstanding the harsh conditions of launch before reaching the zero-gravity environment it was designed for. But what if we could send raw materials into orbit and build the satellite there instead? DARPA (the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency) has formed partnerships with a number of universities to develop 3D printing technology and in-orbit assembly of satellite components. It’s recently put out a new request for proposals to explore biological growth mechanisms in space – the exciting prospect of living organisms that can increase in size, develop structures, and repair themselves. Satellite launches from Earth began on October 4, 1957, when the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik 1, the world’s first artificial satellite. It marked the beginning of the space age and was followed by the U.S. launch of Explorer 1 in 1958. Over the decades that followed, advancements in...

NASA’s asteroid-studying spacecraft Lucy captured an image of its next flyby target, the asteroid Donaldjohanson. On April 20th, the spacecraft will pass within 960 km of the small, main belt asteroid. It will keep imaging it for the next two months as part of its optical navigation program. Donaldjohanson is an unwieldy name for an asteroid, but it’s fitting. Donald Johanson is an American paleoanthropologist who discovered an important australopithecine skeleton in Ethiopia’s Afar Triangle in 1974. The female hominin skeleton showed that bipedal walking developed before larger brain sizes, an important discovery in human evolution. She was named Lucy . NASA named their asteroid-studying mission Lucy because it also seeks to uncover clues about our origins. Instead of ancient skeletal remains, Lucy will study asteroids, which are like fossils of planet formation. During its 12-year mission, Lucy will visit eight asteroids. Two are in the main belt, and six are Jupiter trojans . A...

If you’ve ever looked at Mars through a telescope, you probably noticed its two polar ice caps . The northern one is made largely of water ice—the most obvious sign that Mars was once a wetter, warmer world. A team of researchers from the German Aerospace Center (DLR) used that ice cap to make surprising discoveries about it and what it tells us about Mars’s interior. According to Adrien Broquet and a team of DLR planetary scientists, the northern polar cap on Mars is quite young. They found this out by applying techniques used to measure what ice sheets on Earth do to its surface. The effect that widespread glaciation has is called “glacial isostatic adjustment,” and it’s still happening in places such as Scandinavia. Essentially, it’s a constant movement of land as Earth’s surface deforms in response to the weight of ice. The rate of deformation depends on the specific characteristics of the underlying mantle. Large areas of our planet have been covered at times by thick glacial s...

Our Solar System is in motion and cruises at about 200 kilometres per second relative to the center of the Milky Way. During its long journey, it has passed through different parts of the galaxy. Research shows that the Solar System passed through the Orion star-forming complex about 14 million years ago. The Orion star-forming complex, also known as the Orion molecular cloud complex , is part of a larger structure called the Radcliffe Wave (RW). The RW was discovered very recently, in 2020 . It’s a large, coherent structure that also moves through the galaxy. It’s a wave-like structure of gas and dust that holds many star-forming regions, including the well-known Orion complex and the Perseus and Taurus molecular clouds. It’s almost 9000 light-years long and is within the Milky Way’s Orion arm. The environment in the RW and the Orion complex is more dense, and when the Solar System passed through it, the greater density compressed the Sun’s heliosphere. This allowed more interstell...

Late is better than never for the ‘Blaze Star’ T Coronae Borealis . It was on track to be the top astronomical event for 2024 … and here we are in 2025 , still waiting. You might remember around this time last year, when a notice went out that T Coronae Borealis (‘T CrB’) might brighten into naked eye visibility . Well, the bad news is, the ‘Flare Star’ is officially late to the celestial sky show… but the good news is, recent research definitely shows us that something is definitely afoot. The outburst occurs once every 80 years. First noticed by astronomer John Birmingham in 1866, T Coronae Borealis last brightened in February 1946 . That’s 80 years ago, this month. Located about 2,000 light-years distant on the Hercules/Corona Borealis/Serpens Caput constellation junction border, the star spends most of its time below +10 th magnitude. Typically during outburst, the star flares and tops out at +2 nd magnitude, rivaling the lucida of its host constellation, Alpha Coronae Borea...

A planet’s history is told in its ancient rock. Earth’s oldest rocks are in the Canadian Shield, Australia’s Jack Hill, the Greenstone Belts in Greenland, and a handful of other locations. These rocks hold powerful clues to our planet’s history. On Mars, the same holds true. That’s why NASA’s Perseverance rover is revisiting some of them. Perseverance is exploring Jezero Crater, an ancient paleolake. Its thick layer of sediments may contain evidence of ancient life on Mars. Every crater has a rim, and Perseverance’s current campaign involves studying the rim. The crater rim is different than the sediments. It’s made of ancient rock uplifted and exposed on the surface by the ancient impact that created Jezero. On Earth, geologists regularly study rock that has made itself easy to examine by coming up from the deeper crust and presenting itself. The same thing happens on Mars, though impacts do the lifting, not plate tectonics. Perseverance is studying the rocks on the crater rim in ...

Data from the Chinese rover Zhurong is adding to the pile of evidence for oceans on ancient Mars. For a year, this little craft traveled over nearly two kilometers of the Martian surface and made radar scans of buried natural structures that look like ocean shorelines. Zhurong’s ground-penetrating radar (GPR) looked under the surface to a depth of 80 meters. There, the radar instrument found thick layers of material similar to beach deposits on Earth. The best way to create such formations is by wave action stirring up and depositing sediments along the shore of an ocean. If these findings stand, they’ll provide a deeper look into Mars’s ancient warm, wet past, and the existence of long-gone seas. Map of Utopia Planitia showing the landing site of the Zhurong rover and four proposed ancient shorelines. The landing site is about 280 kilometers north of and some 500 meters lower in elevation than the northern hypothesized shorelines. In its traverse, Zhurong traveled south from its ...

Neutron stars are stellar remnants. Composed of dense nuclear material, they all have strong magnetic fields. But the magnetic fields of some neutron stars can be a thousand times stronger. They are known as magnetars, and we aren’t entirely sure how they generated such powerful magnetic fields. But a new study in Nature Astronomy reveals some clues. The general thought has been that magnetars create their fields through some type of dynamo process. This is where a flow of magnetic material generates a magnetic field. Since the flow is driven by heat convection, it can power strong fields. Earth’s magnetic field is unusually strong for a planet of its size and is powered by the convection of iron in its core. However, the core of a neutron star is made of nucleons, not atoms, so it is difficult to determine a specific dynamo process for magnetars. For this study, the team wanted to understand what are known as low-field magnetars. These are magnetars that have weaker magnetic field...

Well that’s ruined all my lectures! I’ve spent years talking about space and a go to fact is the red colour of Mars. It’s been long believed that it was caused by the same chemical process that creates rust on Earth, a new paper suggests this is not the case! The team of researchers simulated conditions of Mars in a lab and now think a chemical called ferrihydrite, an iron oxide that contains water. It now looks like the planet’s characteristic red colour is due to a time when Mars was covered in water!  Mars, often called the Red Planet is the fourth planet from the Sun. With a thin atmosphere composed mostly of carbon dioxide, Mars features a stark landscape of vast plains, huge volcanoes including Olympus Mons (the largest in our solar system), and deep canyons like Valles Marineris. Its surface has evidence of ancient rivers and lakes, suggesting Mars once had conditions that could have been suitable for microbial life. Its extreme temperature changes and frequent global dust...

According to Darwin, life on Earth may have first appeared in warm little ponds. This simple idea is also a cornerstone in our search for the origin of life. The ponds were rich in important chemicals, and when lightning struck, somehow, it all got going. If the idea is correct, the same thing may have happened on Mars. If it did, and if fossilized evidence of microbes on the planet exists, a new laser could find it. We may never know exactly how life started. It appeared to start about 4 billion years ago on Earth, confined to water for about 3 billion, until our planet developed a UV-blocking ozone layer. If life ever appeared on Mars, it also likely occurred billions of years ago when the planet was warm and wet. There’s a strong possibility that it was also confined to water for a long time. If it did, then ancient sediments could hold fossilized evidence of microbes. NASA’s Perseverance rover landed in Jezero Crater, an ancient paleolake with deep sediments, in an attempt to ...