Universe Today

Ingenuity proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that a helicopter can operate on another planet. Over 72 flights, the little quadcopter that could captivated the imagination of space exploration fans everywhere. But, several factors limited it, and researchers at NASA think they can do better. Two papers presented at the recent Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, held March 10-14 in The Woodlands, Texas, and led by Pascal Lee of NASA Ames and Derric Loya of the SETI Institute and Colorado Mesa University, describe a use case for that still-under-development helicopter, which they call Nighthawk.

Exploration of the outer Solar System may be getting a boost from the Vera Rubin Observatory (VRO). When this gigantic telescope opens its eye later in 2025, it begins a decade-long survey of the ever-changing sky. As part of this time-lapse vision of the cosmos, distant objects in the Kuiper Belt will be among its most challenging targets.

X-ray astronomy is a somewhat neglected corner of the more general field of astronomy. The biggest names in telescopes, like Hubble and James Webb, don't even touch that bandwidth. And Chandra, the most capable space-based X-ray observatory to date, is far less well-known. However, some of the most interesting phenomena in the universe can only be truly understood through X-rays, and it's a shame that the discipline doesn't garner more attention. Kimberly Weaver of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center hopes to change that perception as she works on a NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) grant to develop an in-space X-ray interferometer that could allow us to see for the first time what causes the power behind supermassive black holes.

Thursday brought with it a total lunar eclipse for parts of the world that could see the Moon. If you missed it (like I did) then no problem since Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost mission has got your back. The lunar lander took a break from its science duties on our nearest astronomical neighbour to capture this stunning image of the eclipse. Observers on Earth saw the shadow of the Earth fall across the Moon but for Blue Ghost, it experienced a solar eclipse where the Sun hid behind the Earth!

Solar Power Satellite (SPS) advocates have been dreaming of using space resources to build massive constructions for decades. In-space Resource Utilization (ISRU) advocates would love to oblige them, but so far, there hasn't yet been enough development on either front to create a testable system. A research team from a company called MetaSat and the University of Glasgow hope to change that with a new plan called META-LUNA, which utilizes lunar resources to build (and recycle) a fleet of their specially designed SPS.

The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) has announced the science objectives for Webb's General Observer Programs in Cycle 4 (Cycle 4 GO) program. The Cycle 4 observations include 274 programs that establish the science program for JWST's fourth year of operations, amounting to 8,500 hours of prime observing time. This is a significant increase from Cycle 3​ observations and the 5,500 hours of prime time and 1,000 hours of parallel time it entailed.

A distant trio of worlds may shed light on planetary formation in the early solar system. Sometimes, good things come in threes. If astronomers are correct, a system in the distant Kuiper Belt may not be two but three worlds, offering an insight into formation in the early solar system. The study comes out of researchers at Brigham Young University and the Space Telescope Science Institute.

The increasing frequency of so-called ‘1-in-a-1000-year' weather events highlights how global warming is disrupting rather more typical weather patterns beyond what scientific models can reliably predict. A recent paper proposes a three-tier scientific approach for addressing these unprecedented climate challenges: improving rapid response capabilities, making incremental infrastructure adaptations, and pursuing transformational system changes to manage escalating climate chaos.

Did Water or Lava Cause that Channel? The Answer is in How it Bends

If Mars Samples Contain Life, Can We Detect It?

CubeSats have a lot of advantages. They are small, inexpensive, and easily reproducible. But those advantages also come with significant disadvantages - they have trouble linking into broader constellations that allow them to be more effective at their observational or communication tasks. A team from the University of Albany thinks they might have solved that problem by using a customized calibration algorithm to ensure the right CubeSats link up together.

Located on a mountaintop in Chile, the nearly complete Vera C. Rubin Observatory will capture the Universe in incredible detail. This week saw another huge step for the observatory with the installation of the car sized - yes car sized - LSST camera onto the Simonyi Survey Telescope. The camera is the largest ever built, weighing in at over 3,000 kilograms with an impressive 3,200 megapixels. Coupled to the 8.4 metre optics of the Rubin will allow it to capture everything that happens in the southern sky, night after night.

On March 11, the California skyline was once again treated to the launch of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the Vandenberg Space Force Base. It carried two missions into space; SPHEREx to study the origins of the Universe and the molecular clouds of the Milky Way and four other satellites making up PUNCH. This latter mission is tasked with exploring how the Sun’s outer atmosphere causes the solar wind.

Electrolysis has been a mainstay of crewed mission designs for the outer solar system for decades. It is the most commonly used methodology to split oxygen from water, creating a necessary gas from a necessary liquid. However, electrolysis systems are bulky and power-intensive, so NASA has decided to look into alternative solutions. They supported a company called Precision Combustion, Inc (PCI) via their Institutes for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) grant to work on a system of thermo-photo-catalytic conversion that could dramatically outperform existing electrolysis reactors.

Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have completed a survey of galaxies that reveals their rotation directions with unprecedented clarity. Contrary to expectations that galaxy rotations would be randomly distributed, they discovered a surprising pattern, that most galaxies appear to rotate in a similar direction! One hypothesis suggests the universe itself might have an overall rotation, researchers believe a more plausible explanation though is that Earth's motion through space creates an observational bias, making galaxies rotating in certain directions more detectable than others.

If you're a regular visitor to Universe Today, you've probably noticed that the website looks dramatically different. Simpler, cleaner, without all those pesky intrusive ads. We're in a new era, now. Here's what happened, why I decided to remove the ads from the site, and what you can expect going forward.

Dark matter - that mysterious, unknown stuff that's detectable only by its effect on other matter - seems to be sparking strong emissions at the heart of the Milky Way Galaxy.

Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens was the first to discover a Saturnian moon way back in 1655. Thanks to his skill as a lens grinder and polisher, he was the first person to see Titan. Over the centuries, we've discovered many more moons orbiting the ringed planet. In a surprising announcement on March 11th, the Minor Planet Center announced the discovery of 128 more moons, almost doubling the previous number.

Our local star, the Sun has been under the watchful gaze of ESA’s Solar Orbiter since its launch in 2020. It’s been slowly getting closer and grabbing images using its Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) which citizen scientists have been stitching together into wonderful time-lapse videos. A recent video covers just 15 minutes of real time but within, you can see an M-Class flare that was unleashed by the Sun. The flares can produce brief radio blackouts here on Earth.

Of all the moons in the Solar System, Europa is perhaps one of the most fascinating. With a thick ice shell surrounding a subsurface ocean, astrobiologists hope maybe there is life down there! Finding a way through the ice to explore what’s below is one of the biggest challenges. It’s possible however that the vital chemicals from life could find their way to the surface and through out into space. A new paper proposes an ultraviolet laser could be used to cause amino acids to fluoresce giving away their presence.