SpaceX has Given up Trying to Catch Rocket Fairings. Fishing Them out of the Ocean is Fine If there is one driving force in the commercial space industry it is economics. The whole concept of reusable booster rocket emphasizes the importance of getting launch costs down. SpaceX, the company leading the charge in trying to […]
When Stars Get Too Close to Each Other, They Cast Out Interstellar Comets and Asteroids In October 2017, humanity caught its first-ever glimpse of an interstellar object – a visitor from beyond our solar system – passing nearby the Sun. We named it Oumuamua, and its unusual properties fascinated and confounded astronomers. Less than two […]
You Thought Black Hole Event Horizons Looked Strange. Check out Binary Black Hole Event Horizons One of the strangest predictions of general relativity is that gravity can deflect the path of light. The effect was first observed by Arthur Eddington in 1919. While the bending effect of the Sun is small, near a black hole […]
Astronauts Will Soon be Getting a Space Fridge, Keeping Everything Cold in Zero-G One of the least known of NASA’s funding mechanisms is the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. This program, required by the Baye-Doyle Act of 1980, earmarks a piece of every US Federal agency’s budget (including NASA) for the development of small […]
Citizen Scientists Discover a new Feature in Star Formation: “Yellowballs” AI is often touted as being particularly good at finding patterns amongst reams of data. But humans also are extremely good at pattern recognition, especially when it comes to visual images. Citizen science efforts around the globe leverage this fact, and recent results released from […]
Biden Administration is Looking for a 6.3% Increase in NASA’s Budget for 2022 Space research, like much else in capitalist societies, is driven by funding. The biggest source of that funding for that space research is usually the US government. Which is why, when US presidents release their budget proposals, the space community takes notice. […]
Ground-Based Lasers Could Push Space Debris off Collision-Course Orbits Researchers at the Australian National University (ANU) are finding new uses for the laser-based technology that sharpens telescope imagery – called adaptive optics – and it just might help mitigate the world’s growing space debris problem. Purpose-built lasers could give derelict satellites a slight ‘push’ of […]
If you Want to Move an Asteroid, you Need the Right Kind of Nuclear Explosion Using nuclear devices to deflect or disrupt an asteroid. Sounds a bit crazy, no? Maybe a little too Hollywood? And yet, detonating nukes in space may be necessary someday for the sake of planetary defense. In order for this method […]
Finding Oxygen on an Alien World Doesn’t Always Mean There’s Life There We now know the universe is filled with planets. By one estimate, there are more than 20 billion Earth-like worlds in our galaxy alone. But how many of them are likely to have life? And how would we know if they do? Unless […]
100-meter Asteroid Created a Strange Impact Event in Antarctica 430,000 Years Ago The effects of ancient asteroid impacts on Earth are still evident from the variety of impact craters across our planet. And from the Chelyabinsk event back in 2013, where an asteroid exploded in the air above a Russian town, we know how devastating […]
Galileo Sunspot Sketches Versus Modern ‘Deep Learning’ AI A new study turns modern ‘deep learning’ techniques on Galileo’s early sketches of the Sun. It’s a fascinating thought to consider. What exactly did the Sun look like, centuries ago? What would we see, if astronomers back in the time of Kepler and Galileo had modern technology […]
Earth Gains 5,200 Tons of Dust From Space Every Year Whenever I wipe the dust off my coffee table or catch a glimpse of dust motes floating in sunlight, my spacey mind always wonders, is any of that cosmic dust? It just might be. But the amount of space dust that lands on our planet […]
The Same Technology Could Search for Microbes in Mars Rocks or Under the ice on Europa Ever since it landed in the Jezero Crater on Feb. 18th, 2021, the Perseverance rover has been prepping its scientific instruments to begin searching for signs of past life on the Red Planet. These include spectrometers that will scan […]
Trojan Mission Lucy Tested its Solar Panels for the First Time. Those Things are Huge Space missions often have to go where the sun don’t shine. Or at least where it shines very faintly. That is particularly important if the mission draws its power from the sun. Luckily, engineers have a way of dealing with […]
Gaia Finds 12 Examples of Einstein Crosses; Galaxies Being Gravitationally Lensed so we see Them Repeated 4 Times In 1915, Einstein put the finishing touches on his Theory of General Relativity (GR), a revolutionary new hypothesis that described gravity as a geometric property of space and time. This theory remains the accepted description of gravitation […]
Brown Dwarfs can Spin so Fast They Almost Tear Themselves Apart We tend to image planets as spheres. Held together by gravity, the material of a planet compresses and shifts until gravity and pressure reach a balance point known as hydrostatic equilibrium. Hydrostatic equilibrium is one of the defining characteristics of a planet. If a […]
OSIRIS-REx Did One Last Close Flyby of Asteroid Bennu. It’s Almost Time to Come Home After more than two years in orbit around asteroid Bennu, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is ready to come home. It’s bringing with it a pristine sample of space rocks that geologists here on Earth are eager to study up close. The […]
How’s the Weather in Jezero Crater? According to Perseverance: Cold On February 18th, 2021, the Perseverance rover landed in the Jezero crater on Mars. Shortly thereafter, it powered up some of the scientific instruments it will use to conduct science operations and search for potential evidence of past life. One such instrument is the Mars […]
Primordial Asteroids That Never Suffered Massive Collisions all Seem to be Larger Than 100 km. Why? Planetary systems form out of the remnant gas and dust of a primordial star. The material collapses into a protoplanetary disk around the young star, and the clumps that form within the disk eventually become planets, asteroids, or other […]
What Would Raindrops be Like on Other Worlds? Precipitation is much more widespread throughout that solar system than commonly assumed. Obviously it rains water on Earth. But it snows carbon dioxide on Mars, rains methane on Titan, sulfuric acid on Venus, and could potentially rain diamonds on Neptune. The type of material falling out of […]
