There's a Type 1a Supernova in the Making, Just 150 Light-Years Away

Astronomers have discovered a remarkable star system just 150 light-years from Earth that's destined for a spectacular cosmic display. The system contains a white dwarf star drawing material from its companion star, with the pair orbiting at just 1/60th of the Earth-Sun distance. With their combined mass reaching 1.56 times that of our Sun, these stars are gradually spiralling toward each other, setting the stage for a spectacular explosion. Fortunately, scientists estimate this cataclysmic event won't occur for roughly 23 billion years, long after our own Sun will have reached the end of its life cycle.

Asteroid 2024 YR4 Won't Hit Earth, But There May Be a Lunar Light Show

Although astronomers have ruled out a smash-up between Earth and an asteroid known as 2024 YR4 in the year 2032, the building-sized space rock still has a chance of hitting the moon. In fact, the chances — slight as they are — have doubled in the past month.

Terraforming Mars Will Require Hitting It With Mulitple Asteroids

Terraforming Mars has been the long-term dream of colonization enthusiasts for decades. But when you start to grapple with the actual physics of what would be necessary to do so, the effort seems further and further out of reach. Depictions like those of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy are just wildly unrealistic regarding the sheer amount of material that must be moved to the Red Planet to achieve anything remotely resembling Earth-like conditions. That is the conclusion of an abstract presented at the 56th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference by Leszek Czechowski of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

20 Years of Uranus Observations by Hubble Show a Changing Planet

In 1986, the Voyager 2 spacecraft made a flyby of Uranus. It gave us the first detailed images of the distant world. What was once only seen as a featureless pale blue orb was revealed to be...well, a mostly featureless pale blue orb. The flyby gave astronomers plenty of data, but the images Voyager 2 returned were uninspiring. That's because Voyager only viewed Uranus for a moment in time. Things change slowly on the ice giant world, and to study them you need to take a longer view.

A New Graduate Project Plans to Make Martian Water Drinkable

Mars exploration technology has seen a lot of recent successes. MOXIE successfully made oxygen from the atmosphere, while Ingenuity soared above the red planet 72 times. However, to date, no one has ever achieved one thing that will be absolutely critical to any long-term presence on Mars - making drinkable water. There have been plenty of ideas on how to do that. Still, NASA recently started funding a Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) graduate student named Lydia Ellen Tonani-Penha to look into the problem under their Space Technology Graduate Research Opportunities (NSTGRO) funding program. Her Project Tethys will examine ways to purify the frozen or liquid brine that Mars is infused with.

Perseverance Watched a Dust Devil Eat Another

NASA's Perseverance was scanning the rim of Jezero Crater when it spotted a Martian dust devil overtake and consume another smaller one. The rover was about a kilometer away from the larger dust devil, which was about 65 meters wide. The smaller one was about 5 meters wide. This isn't Perseverance's first encounter with dust devils. It's seen clusters dancing around it and even captured audio of a dust devil on Mars for the first time.

Want to Know How to Survive in Space? Ask a Tardigrade

Tardigrades are some of the most durable animals ever found. They can handle temperature ranges from -271°C to over 150°C, pressures above 1,200 atmospheric levels, extreme drying, and intense ionizing radiation. Researchers have been studying some of the adaptations that can keep tardigrades alive in extreme environments and consider how they could apply to human space exploration, as well as insights into extraterrestrial life.

Artemis ESM's Could be Repurposed for Future Missions

In a recent paper, an international team of scientists identified how the Orion spacecraft's European Service Module (ESM) could be reused. Rather than letting them burn up in Earth's atmosphere, as planned, they recommend that the ESMs use their power and propulsion capability to conduct valuable scientific research.

Lunar Regolith Could Power a Future Lunar Station

Any advanced civilisation needs power. Don’t know about you but I’ve been camping lots, even wild camping but the experience is a whole lot easier if you have power! It’s the same for a long-term presence on the Moon (not that I’m likening my camping to a trip to the Moon!) but instead of launching a bunch of solar panels, a new paper suggests we can get power from the lunar regolith! Researchers suggest that the fine dusty material on the surface of the Moon could be melted to provide a type of crystals that can produce solar electricity! This would allow solar panels to be built on the Moon with only 1% of components sent from Earth!

Here's How We Could Quickly Raise Temperatures on Mars

Mars is a cold, dry desert, but it could be possible to rapidly increase the temperature of the planet by releasing particles into the atmosphere. Researchers investigated two possible chemicals: graphene or aluminum. With just two liters per second of release, we could double the Mars greenhouse effect, raising its temperature by +5 Kelvin in only 1.1 years. Once the chemical release is stopped, the planet would cool back to its normal state.

Galaxies Were Already Dying Just 700 Million Years After the Big Bang

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.

Perseverance is Trying Out Spacesuit Materials on Mars

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.

Students Designed a Mission to Venus on the Cheap

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.

LOOKING GLASS: Exploring Titan's Icy Hydrocarbon Cycle

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.

Travellers to Mars Need to Avoid the Dust

Travellers to Mars Need to Avoid the Dust

Venus Could Be Much More Volcanically Active Than We Thought

Even though Jupiter's moon Io is considered the most volcanically active world in the Solar System, Venus actually has more volcanoes and volcanic features on its surface. For a long time, scientists thought that most of these features and volcanoes were ancient remnants of the planet's geological past. However, newer research shows that Venus is still volcanically active.