Universe Today

An innovative proposal would be a first for planetary exploration. Turns out, it’s as tough to drop inward into the inner solar system, as it is to head outward. The problem stems from losing momentum from a launch starting point on Earth. It can take missions several years and planetary flybys before capture and arrival in orbit around Mercury or Venus. Now, a new proposal would see a mission make the trip, using innovative and fuel efficient means.

The Torino scale assess’ the risk of a near-Earth object impacting Earth. The list has just had a new addition, asteroid 2024 YR4 which poses a risk to Earth in 2032. The risk has been downgraded to 0% but there’s still value in studying asteroids that are going to come close to Earth. The James Webb Space Telescope just joined in the study by observing the asteroid to provide a new estimate of its size and showed that it’s spinning rapidly.

The news is always full of images from the Hubble Space Telescope and more recently the James Webb Space telescope but there is a new kid on the block. NASA’s SPHEREx space telescope was launched back in early March and we can already see its first image. The telescope has six detectors and together they can capture a region of sky 20 times wider than the Moon. The first images are uncalibrated but they give a hint as to the capabilities of the instrument.

How can Uranus be used to indirectly study its moons and identify if they possess subsurface oceans? This is what a recent study presented at the 56th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference hopes to address as a team of scientists investigated using passive radar sounding methods from Uranus to study its five largest moons: Miranda, Ariel, Umbriel, Titania, and Oberon. This study has the potential to help researchers better understand the formation and evolution of Uranus and its largest moons despite a spacecraft not currently visiting Uranus.

When galaxies run out of primordial hydrogen and helium, they cease star formation, shifting to primarily long-lived red stars. These galaxies are considered "red and dead." It usually takes billions of years for galaxies to run out of hydrogen, but now astronomers using JWST have found examples of galaxies that have already stopped forming stars just 700 million years after the Big Bang, much earlier than predicted by cosmological models.

Sometimes, the best way to learn how to do something is just to do it. That is especially true if you're learning to do something using a specific methodology. And in some cases, the outcome of your efforts is something that's interesting to other people. A team from across the European Union, led by PhD candidate Domenico D'Auria, spent a few days last September performing just such an exercise - and their work resulted in a mission architecture known as the Planetary Exploration Deployment and Research Operation - Venus, or PEDRO-V.

NASA's Perseverance Rover is an ambitious mission. Along with its day-to-day exploration, the rover carried an experimental rotorcraft and is also caching samples for eventual return to Earth. But there's another aspect to its mission that's hidden in the glare of its ambitions. The rover is busy testing five different spacesuit materials.

Blackholes are a fascinating class of object to study. We have learned significant amounts over the years but one of the outstanding mysteries remains; how there were supermassive black holes with millions or even billions of times the mass of the Sun present in the first billion years after the Big Bang. Our current models of stellar mass black hole evolution and mergers cannot explain their existence. A new paper suggests that ultralight dark matter particles, like axions may have done the trick and provides a mass range for expected particles.

As humans continue to make tentative progress out into the cosmos, the impact of space exploration on our fragile bodies is only beginning to be understood. We know that space travel decreases muscle and bone mass but a team of researchers have discovered which bones suffer the most! Using a group of mice that became astro-rodents for 37 days, they discovered that bone degeneration effective the femur most but not the vertebrae. They concluded that it’s our weight-bearing bones that suffer the most.

Travellers to Mars Need to Avoid the Dust

Many health problems are faced by astronauts who spend significant amounts of time in space. But perhaps one of the most insidious is the danger to their mental health. In particular, a prolonged sense of loneliness that could crop up as part of a long-term deep space mission could have dire consequences. A recent paper from Matthieu Guitton, the editor-in-chief of the journal Computers in Human Behavior: Artificial Humans and a researcher at the CERVO Brain Research Center in Quebec, proposes one potential solution to that risk - social robots.

One of the common misconceptions about black holes is that they devour not only matter, but also the history of that matter. So when a black hole forms, you can only guess how it came to be. That isn't entirely true. Informational history is only lost when matter crosses the event horizon, and perhaps not even then. The material surrounding a black hole still has a rich history. In a recent study, astronomers have used that history to uncover the origins of a black hole system.

Though wildly different in so many ways, Earth and Saturn's moon Titan have something important in common. Among all the objects in the Solar System, they're the only two with liquids on their surfaces. There are parallels in how the liquids move in cycles on both worlds and a new mission proposal outlines how we can understand Titan better by studying these parallel processes.

Could microbes survive in the permanently shadowed regions (PSRs) of the Moon? This is what a recent study presented at the 56th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference hopes to address as a team of researchers from the United States and Canada investigated the likelihood of long-term survival for microbes in the PSR areas of the Moon, which are craters located at the poles that don’t see sunlight due to the Moon’s small axial tilt. This study has the potential to help researchers better understand unlikely locations where they could find life as we know it throughout the solar system.

What can a sample return mission from Jupiter’s volcanic moon, Io, teach scientists about planetary and satellite (moon) formation and evolution? This is what a recent study presented at the 56th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference hopes to address as an international team of more than two dozen scientists discussed the benefits and challenges of a mission to Io with the goal of sampling its volcanic plumes that eject from its surface on a regular basis.

It’s getting a little harder to be the first humans to achieve something but, if all goes to plan, a team of four private astronauts are expected to head off into a polar orbit around Earth aboard the SpaceX Dragon capsule today (31 March) at 9:46pm ET and take the crew over the North and South Poles of Earth. Financed by Chun Wang, a Malta-based investor, they are planning a series of experiments, including attempting to grow oyster mushrooms in microgravity, which could eventually become a source of food for space missions.

Astronomers suspect that Europa has cryovolcanoes, regions where briny water could erupt through Europa's ice shell, throwing water—and hopefully organic molecules—into space. NASA's Europa Clipper and ESA's JUICE mission are on their way and will be able to scan the surface of the icy moon for signs of cryovolcanism. What should they be looking for? Pockets of brine just below the surface could be active for 60,000 years and should be warmer than their surroundings.

Subsurface Habitats on the Moon and Mars Could Be Grown Using Mushrooms and Inflatable Robots

One of the first verified predictions of general relativity is the gravitational deflection of starlight. The effect was [first observed in 1919 during a total solar eclipse.](https://briankoberlein.com/post/einstein-and-eddington/) Since stars appear as points of light, the effect is seen as an apparent shift in the position of stars near the eclipse. But the effect happens more generally. If a distant galaxy is obscured by a closer one, some of the distant light is gravitationally lensed around the closer galaxy, giving us a warped and distorted view of the faraway stars. This effect can also magnify the distant galaxy, making its light appear brighter, and we have used this effect to observe some of the most distant stars in the Universe.

In-situ resource utilization will likely play a major role in any future long-term settlement of the Moon. However, designing such a system in advance with our current level of knowledge will prove difficult, mainly because there's so much uncertainty around both the availability of those resources and the efficacy of the processes used to extract them. Luckily, researchers have tools that can try to deal with both of those uncertainties - statistical modeling. A team from Imperial College London, the University of Munich, and the Luxembourg Institue of Science and Technology recently released a pre-print paper on arXiv that uses a well-known statistical modeling method known as Monte Carlo simulation to try to assess what type of ISRU plan would be best for use on the Moon.