Here’s one less thing to worry about—or to look forward to: NASA has ruled out any chance that an asteroid called 2024 YR4 will hit the moon in 2032. Last year, the uncertainty surrounding the space rock’s orbital path held out a slight chance of impact, but fresh observations from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope confirm that it’ll be a miss.
Most space missions rely on chemical rockets for propulsion. Rockets must carry fuel, which increases spacecraft mass and limits their speed and travel distance. For decades, researchers have explored light sails as an alternative. These devices use radiation pressure—the force exerted when light reflects from a surface—to generate thrust. When driven by a powerful laser, a light sail can accelerate continuously without onboard propellant, enabling faster travel across the solar system.
When NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman announced the revamped approach to the Artemis moon program, it was unclear whether the new mobile launcher that has been constructed over the last two years at Kennedy Space Center would ever get used.
Anyone familiar with the search for alien life will have heard of the “Goldilocks Zone” around a star. This is defined as the orbital band where the temperature is just right for liquid water to pool on a rocky planet’s surface—a good approximation for what we thought of as the early conditions for life on Earth. But what happens if that life doesn’t stay on an Earth analog? If they, like we, start to move toward their neighboring planets, the idea of a habitable zone becomes much more complicated. A new paper from Dr. Caleb Scharf of the NASA Ames Research Center, and one of the agency’s premier astrobiologists, tries to account for this possibility by introducing the framework of an Interplanetary Habitable Zone (IHZ). The work is published on the arXiv preprint server.
When the densest objects in the universe collide and merge, the violence sets off ripples, in the form of gravitational waves, that reverberate across space and time, over hundreds of millions and even billions of years. By the time they pass through Earth, such cosmic ripples are barely discernible.
On April 8, 2024, people across the world witnessed a solar eclipse, a relatively rare event in which the moon occults (blocks out) light from the sun. To capture this event, volunteers at 143 observatories across the U.S. trained their equipment on it as part of NASA’s Eclipse Megamovie citizen science project. The images they took were groundbreaking and provided some of the most detailed images to date of the sun’s corona. After nearly two years of production and editing, the Eclipse Megamovie team has released the dataset from this project.
As the U.S. plans to return to the moon with the upcoming Artemis II mission, a question endures: What will future lunar explorers eat? According to new research from The University of Texas at Austin, the answer might be chickpeas.
Researchers from the University of Bologna and the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) along with other institutes have proposed a new way to address the Hubble tension by comparing estimates of the universe’s age rather than its expansion rate. Using precise stellar data, they determined ages for carefully selected very old Milky Way stars and found a most likely age of about 13.6 billion years.
Healable spacecraft structures could soon be possible thanks to cutting-edge composite technology. Swiss companies CompPair and CSEM with Belgian company Com&Sens have partnered with the European Space Agency (ESA) to modify their self-healing carbon fiber product for use in space transportation.
What happens when a solar superstorm hits Mars? Thanks to the European Space Agency’s Mars orbiters, we now know: glitching spacecraft and a supercharged upper atmosphere.
With desert cities like Phoenix and Tucson bracing for their allotments of Colorado River water to be slashed dramatically, San Diego County’s water agency could for the first time sell some of its water to other states by drawing on its ample supplies from the nation’s largest desalination plant.
NASA announced it had found the source of a helium flow blockage that forced it to roll the Artemis II rocket back from the launch pad at Kennedy Space Center and delay its lunar fly-by mission until at least April.
Just a few days in simulated microgravity can subtly change the way women’s blood clots, sparking bigger questions about health monitoring protocols for astronauts who can spend six months or more in orbit, say Simon Fraser University researchers. First reported in 2020, an International Space Station mission detected an unexpected blood clot in a female astronaut’s jugular vein. To date, space-health research has had more male participants, but with the number of female astronauts on the rise, a new SFU–European Space Agency study examined how microgravity affects blood clotting specifically in women.
In a first, a space mission led by NASA and France has tracked Earth’s rivers swelling and shrinking from month to month over the course of a year and found significantly less of a swing than previous model-based estimates. A record drought in the Amazon likely influenced the tally made by the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite. The findings also reveal new details about the underwater topography of the world’s river channels.
Astronomers have reported observations of a rare star system consisting of one star orbiting a system of three more tightly bound stars. This quadruple star system is described in a new study, published in Nature Communications, as the most compact quadruple star system observed to date, with all four stars fitting into an area the size of Jupiter’s orbit.
Under the supervision of Université de Montréal archaeology professor Christina Halperin, Ph.D. student Jean Tremblay spent six years, from 2018 to 2024, studying how the Mayan city of Ucanal managed its drinking water. Combining geochemistry and paleolimnology, his interdisciplinary study explored the archaeological and social issues surrounding access to water and status-based disparities in a densely populated, pre-Hispanic urban environment.
Craters, craters, and yet more craters: this snapshot from ESA’s Mars Express is packed full of them, each as fascinating as the last.
The food flying aboard Artemis II is designed to support crew health and performance during the mission around the moon. With no resupply, refrigeration, or late-load capability, all meals must be carefully selected to remain safe, shelf-stable, and easy to prepare and consume in NASA’s Orion spacecraft. Food selections are developed in coordination with space food experts and the crew to balance calorie needs, hydration, and nutrient intake while accommodating individual crew preferences.
An international team of scientists, led by a Ph.D. researcher from Northumbria University, has made further discoveries about a spectacular feature of Jupiter’s northern lights, revealing a never-before-seen temperature structure and dramatic density changes within the top of the giant planet’s atmosphere.
Using the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher for the Northern Hemisphere (HARPS-N), an international team of astronomers has discovered a hot sub-Neptune exoplanet orbiting a nearby star. The newfound alien world, designated TOI-5734 b, is about two times larger and nine times more massive than Earth. The discovery was presented in a research paper published February 20 on the arXiv pre-print server.
