SpaceX's Starship Rocket Does Its Job During First Orbital Flight

SpaceX sent its Starship super-rocket on its first orbital flight — a shorter-than-planned test mission that put operational Starlink satellites into orbit for the first time.

Mars Has a Warm Region Inside

Something deep inside Mars has scientists looking for clues to its internal evolution. A team at the University of Arizona led by Alexander Byrne, used a technique called "tidal tomography" to probe a heat anomaly in the southern hemisphere mantle. It turns out this subsurface region measures about 200 to 400 degrees Celsius warmer than the rest of the mantle. That warm spot may contain information about how Mars has changed over its lifetime.

Why the World’s Biggest Radio Telescope Had to Tweak Nature’s Perfect Sunflower Spiral

Scientists love taking inspiration from nature. The evolutionary processes that have created such a diverse panoply of life on Earth can be a great source of ideas in solving technical problems. One such example is the pattern of sunflower seeds - they are arranged in a mathematically optimized pattern known as a Vogel spiral, and the international team building the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) in Australia decided to lay out their antennas in a similar pattern. But, as they report in a paper recently published in the Journal of Astronomical Telescopes, Instruments, and Systems, when they did so they found a huge blind spot in the data which hints that maybe this particular natural pattern might need to be modified to work well for this particular application.

A 1,000°C Lunar Microreactor Could Power the Next Era of Moon Bases

As humanity continues to move towards a permanent settlement on the Moon, we still have at least one big hurdle to face - the lunar night, which lasts for roughly fourteen days straight and can drop temperatures to a bone-chilling -223°C. In order to survive those conditions, we need a power source that doesn’t come and go with the Sun, or rely on non-existent stock of coal, gas or wind. In other words, we need nuclear power, and a new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv by Julius Mercz of the Technical University of Munich and his co-authors, describes a new type of nuclear reactor that wouldn’t just power a habitat’s environmental systems, but also enable its materials extraction technologies as well.

The Solar System’s First Planets Were Made of Fire, Not Ice

The early stages of the solar system remain shrouded in mystery. Not much remains from that time, but scientists have developed plenty of theories about what was going on back then. One of those theories attempts to answer a simple question - did the early system prefer “fire” or “ice”? A new paper published in Nature Astrophysics from lead author Damanveer Grewal, an assistant professor of Earth and planetary sciences at Yale, and his co-authors, have a definitive answer to that question - the early solar system preferred fire.

JWST Finds Dynamic Structural Evolution in Chariklo’s Rings

When we think of asteroids, we often think of the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter that contains the majority of the known asteroids in our solar system. However, our solar system hosts several other populations of asteroids and icy rocks, including the Jupiter Trojan asteroids that orbit in Jupiter’s orbit, and the icy bodies and comets of the Kuiper Belt. But there’s one population of asteroids that often gets overlooked called Centaurs, primarily because their orbits are not in a fixed location and instead whose orbits cross the orbits of the outer planets.

Carbon Rocks Deep Underground Could Hold the Evidence of Mars' Watery Past.

A new geochemical modeling study led by researchers at JAXA and the University of Tokyo addresses Mars' "missing" stores of carbonate rocks.