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New Japanese mission will be going to the Moons of Mars In the coming decades, the world’s largest space agencies hope to mount some exciting missions to the Moon and to Mars. Between NASA, Roscosmos, the European Space Agency (ESA), the Chinese National Space Agency (CNSA) and the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), there is simply no shortage of proposals for Lunar bases, crewed missions to Mars, and robotic explorers to both. However, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has a different mission in mind when it comes to the coming decades. Instead of exploring the Moon or Mars, they propose exploring the moons ofRead More →

Enjoy The Biggest Infrared Image Ever Taken Of The Small Magellanic Cloud Without All That Pesky Dust In The Way The Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) galaxy. Credit: ESA/VISTA The Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) is one of the Milky Way’s nearest companions (along with the Large Magellanic Cloud.) It’s visible with the naked eye in the southern hemisphere. A new image from the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) has peered through the clouds that obscure it and given us our biggest image ever of the dwarf galaxy. The SMC contains several hundred million stars, is about 7,000 light yearsRead More →

Building Rovers That Can Detect Life and Sequence DNA on Other Worlds In 2015, then-NASA Chief Scientist Ellen Stofan stated that, “I believe we are going to have strong indications of life beyond Earth in the next decade and definite evidence in the next 10 to 20 years.” With multiple missions scheduled to search foe evidence of life (past and present) on Mars and in the outer Solar System, this hardly seems like an unrealistic appraisal. But of course, finding evidence of life is no easy task. In addition to concerns over contamination, there is also the and the hazards the comes with operating inRead More →

Why Do Rockets Need Stages? The Quest to Build a Single Stage to Orbit (SSTO) Now, don’t get me wrong, Science Fiction is awesome. Like almost everyone working in the field of space and astronomy, I was deeply influenced by science fiction. For me, it was Star Trek and Star Wars. I had a toy phaser that made this awesome really loud phaser sound, and I played with it non-stop until it disappeared one day. And I was sure I’d left it in the middle of my floor, like I did with all my toys, but I found it a few years later, hidden upRead More →

Comet Halley Plays Bit Part In Weekend Eta Aquarid Meteor Shower Watch for the Eta Aquarid shower this week, so called because meteors will appear to radiate from near the star Eta Aquarii.  The meteors originate from fragments of Halley’s Comet strewn about its orbit. Every May, Earth crosses the stream and we get a meteor shower. At maximum on Saturday morning May 6, 25-30 meteors per hour might be seen from the right location under dark skies. Map: Bob King, Source: Stellarium Halley’s Comet may be at the far end of its orbit 3.2 billion miles (5.1 billion km) from Earth, but this week fragments ofRead More →

Where Should We Look For Ancient Civilizations in the Solar System? The search for life in the Universe takes many paths. There’s SETI, or the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, which is searching for signals from a distant ancient civilization. There’s the exploration of our own Solar System, on Mars, or underneath the subsurface oceans of Europa and Enceladus, to see if life can be anywhere there’s liquid water and a source of energy. And upcoming space telescopes like James Webb will attempt to directly image the atmospheres of distant extrasolar planets, to see if they contain the distinct chemical signatures of life. But according toRead More →

Rise Of The Super Telescopes: The Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope We humans have an insatiable hunger to understand the Universe. As Carl Sagan said, “Understanding is Ecstasy.” But to understand the Universe, we need better and better ways to observe it. And that means one thing: big, huge, enormous telescopes. In this series we’ll look at the world’s upcoming Super Telescopes: The Giant Magellan Telescope The Overwhelmingly Large Telescope The 30 Meter Telescope The European Extremely Large Telescope The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope The James Webb Space Telescope The Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope The Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) It’s easy toRead More →

Carnival of Space #507 Welcome, come in to the 507th Carnival of Space! The Carnival is a community of space science and astronomy writers and bloggers, who submit their best work each week for your benefit. I’m Susie Murph, part of the team at Universe Today and CosmoQuest. So now, on to this week’s stories! Over at Planetaria, Paul Scott Anderson reports on New findings from two ‘ocean moons’ increase possibility of finding alien life. Cassini and the Hubble Space Telescope have dramatically increased our odds in this endeavor. Paul also reports on how four of the Trappist worlds may genuinely be covered in water,Read More →

NASA’s Space Chainmail to Give Astronauts the Edge in Space Duels One would think NASA was preparing for a some sword fights in space! At least, that’s the impression one might get when they see the new armor NASA is developing for the first time. Officially, they are referring to it as a new type of “space fabric“, one which will provide protection to astronauts, spaceships and deployable devices. But to the casual observer, it looks a lot like chain mail armor! The new armor is the brainchild of Polit Casillas, a systems engineer from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Inspired by traditional textiles, this armorRead More →

SpaceX Stages Stupendous NRO Spysat Sunrise Liftoff and Land Landing SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying classified NROL-76 surveillance satellite for the National Reconnaissance Office successfully launches shortly after sunrise from Launch Complex 39A on 1 May 2017 from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. 1st stage accomplished successful ground landing at the Cape nine minutes later. Credit: Ken Kremer/Kenkremer.com KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, FL – SpaceX today staged the stupendously successful Falcon 9 rocket launch at sunrise of a mysterious spy satellite in support of U.S. national defense for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) while simultaneously accomplishing a breathtaking pinpoint land landing of the boosters firstRead More →

What’s that Strange Glowing Mold? Astronauts will Soon be Able to Sequence Unknown Space Organisms Seeking to understand more about space-born microbes, NASA has initiated a program known as Genes in Space-3 – a collaborative effort that will prepare, sequence and identify unknown organisms, entirely from space. For those who might be thinking that this sounds a lot like the film Life – where astronauts revive an alien organism on the International Space Station and everyone dies! – rest assured, this is not the setup for some horror movie. In truth, it represents a game-changing development that builds on recent accomplishments, where DNA was firstRead More →

An Aging Pulsar has Captured a new Companion, and it’s Spinning back up Again When massive stars reach the end of their life cycle, they explode in a massive supernova and cast off most of their material. What’s left is a “milliscond pulsar”, a super dense, highly-magnetized neutron star that spins rapidly and emit beams of electromagnetic radiation. Eventually, these stars lose their rotational energy and begin to slow down, but they can speed up again with the help of a companion. According to a recent study, an international team of scientists witnessed this rare event when observing an ultra-slow pulsar located in the neighboringRead More →

Star-travel 5 Million Years Into The Milky Way’s Future Two Million Stars on the Move Gaze into Gaia’s crystal ball and you will see the future. This video shows the motion of 2,057,050 stars in the coming 5 million years from the Tycho-Gaia Astrometric Solution sample, part of the first data release of European Space Agency’s Gaia mission back in September 2016. Gaia is a space observatory parked at the L2 Lagrange Point, a stable place in space a million miles behind Earth as viewed from the Sun. Its mission is astrometry: measuring the precise positions, distances and motion of 1 billion astronomical objects (primarily stars) to create aRead More →

Surveillance Sat Set for Sunday Sunrise SpaceX Blastoff and Landing Apr. 30 – Watch Live SpaceX Falcon 9 recycled rocket carrying SES-10 telecomsat raised erect atop Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center as seen from inside the pad ahead of liftoff on 30 Mar 2017 on world’s first reflight of an orbit class rocket, in this file photo. Credit: Ken Kremer/Kenkremer.com KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, FL – A classified surveillance for the nation’s spymasters is set for blastoff shortly after sunrise on Sunday, Apr. 30 by SpaceX in a space first by the firm founded by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk that also features aRead More →

LEGO Apollo Saturn V: Tallest LEGO Ideas Set Ever Made LEGO Saturn V in launch configuration. Credit: LEGO Yesterday LEGO announced that their new LEGO Apollo Saturn V set will be available to buy on June 1, 2017. And let me tell you, this thing is going to be a monster. In fact, it’ll be the tallest LEGO set ever made from their crowdsourced LEGO Ideas competition, with a total height of 1 meter (39 inches). It’s going have a total of 1969 pieces (got to assume this isn’t a coincidence), and it contains all the separate parts to run your own simulated Moon missionRead More →

TRAPPIST-1 System Ideal For Life Swapping Back in February of 2017, NASA announced the discovery of a seven-planet system orbiting a nearby star. This system, known as TRAPPIST-1, is of particular interest to astronomers because of the nature and orbits of the planets. Not only are all seven planets terrestrial in nature (i.e. rocky), but three of the seven have been confirmed to be within the star’s habitable zone (aka. “Goldilocks Zone”). But beyond the chance that some of these planets could be inhabited, there is also the possibility that their proximity to each other could allow for life to be transferred between them. ThatRead More →