Universe Today
Baby, She's Back! SpaceX Catches a Starship From Orbit for First Time
SpaceX brought back its Starship rocket's second stage for a first-ever midair capture at its launch pad, capping a record-setting, 22.5-hour orbital flight test.
Missions
Space missions and spacecraft
Recent Articles
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SpaceX Launches Starship But Passes Up Booster Catch for Safety's Sake
SpaceX sent its Starship on a flight that was meant to feature a first-ever retrieval of both rocket stages, but a launch-pad catch of the first-stage booster had to be canceled due to safety concerns.
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Automated Assembly in Space is the Future and NOM4D is Showing the Way
The ability to build large structures in space is maturing. The ISS, Mir, and Tiangong were built in space from pre-constructed modules, but a new program called NOM4D is taking space construction to the next level. It recently showed that a simple robot can create truss-like structures in space from premade components. Is the sky the limit for NOM4D?
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An Artificial CORTEX to Guide Satellite Rescue Missions
Thousands of so-called zombie satellites orbit Earth in the critical Low-Earth Orbit regime. They're either inactive or have stopped alerting other satellites to their presence. Researchers are building a system called CORTEX that can guide a repair satellite to autonomously dock with these zombies.
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NASA's Twin Spacecraft Will Execute Powered Slingshot Maneuvers on Their Way to Mars
NASA's ESCAPADE mission features a pair of identical spacecraft on their way to Mars. They launched outside of the normal launch window, so they'll perform powered slingshot maneuvers to boost their speed. Once there, they'll "fly" in formation and study how the solar wind interacts with what remains of Mars ancient magnetosphere.
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Hera Probe Sees Asteroid Pair Separately for First Time
Planetary defense is a growing concern among the scientific community, as efforts have been made to design and implement missions meant to deflect incoming threats to the Earth well in advance. In 2022, NASA intentionally collided the Double Asteroid Redirection test (DART) planetary defense spacecraft into the smaller asteroid of the binary asteroid, Didymos and Dimorphos, with the latter being the smaller one. While the goal was to ascertain if deflecting an asteroid is feasible, how did this influence the geological characteristics of Dimorphos, and what can it teach us about planetary defense missions?
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Virgin Galactic Flies Next-Gen Space Plane to New Home With New Name
Virgin Galactic is back in the spaceflight spotlight with the unveiling of a shiny new object: an updated Delta-class suborbital space plane with an exotic name.
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NASA Systems Engineering Team Details HWO Mission Architecture
Finding an Earth-like world beyond the solar system is the Holy Grail of exoplanet research, and the field has experienced incredible technological advancements in searching for and identifying exoplanets since the first exoplanet was discovered in 1995. This includes both ground- and space-based telescopes, specifically the powerful James Webb Space Telescope. However, directly imaging exoplanets remains elusive, primarily due to the enormous technological challenge of imaging a point of light so far away.
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How Inversion and NASA Plan to Unlock Interplanetary Aerocapture
Using a planet’s atmosphere to secure a satellite’s place in orbit, a process known as “aerocapture”, has been the dream of flight engineers for decades. The only problem? It’s really hard to actually do. It requires control systems, thermal management, and orbital mechanics to all coordinate in a dance that allows a spacecraft to not just slow down while passing by another planet (or moon in some cases) but to start to orbit it without the use of lots of additional propellant. For now, that remains a dream, but a recent NASA contract to a California start-up called Inversion is another step towards making it a reality.
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JAXA's Martian Moons eXploration Mission is on its Way to Mars and Phobos
JAXA successfully launched its Martian Moon eXplorer on its way to Mars and Phobos. It'll reach Mars in about six months, and will orbit the planet for about a month before transferring to an orbit around Phobos. It will deploy a small lander, which will help select a sample-gathering location for the main part of the mission. By 2031, the regolith sample from Phobos should be back on Earth.
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The Perseverance Rover Reaches Another Milestone
NASA's Perseverance Rover has reached another milestone. It now holds the record for the longest distance travelled on another world, meaning Mars and Earth's Moon. It's all thanks the ingenuity behind AutoNav, it's hazard-detection driving system. It's a win for science, as more distance travelled means more scientific objectives are reached.
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The Preliminary Lunar Science Report for Artemis II is Out!
Through photographs, spoken observations, drawings, and annotations, the Artemis II crew created a unique scientific record—one that is now available to the science community and the public for further study. Explore highlights here, and find the full suite of reports and select data resources at the bottom of the page.
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X-Rays and AI Reveal How Spacecraft Heat Shields Burn in Real Time
Heat shields are undeniably one of the most important parts of any spacecraft that intends to enter an atmosphere. And the material they are made out of is absolutely critical. Improving them has been a bit of a challenge though, as typically researchers only get “before” and “after” pictures of when the heat shield completes its job of helping a spacecraft land safely back on Earth. That changed recently, though, with a collaboration between NASA and the Advanced Light Source (ALS) located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which allowed researchers to watch a heat shield fall apart in real time.
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NASA's First Selection for a New Class of Mission: The PRIMA Far-Infrared Telescope
NASA announced Wednesday a mission to explore the history and evolution of the universe, PRIMA (PRobe far-Infrared Mission for Astrophysics), is advancing to the next phase of development. This space telescope is the first in a new class of NASA astrophysics missions, called Probe Explorers, within the agency’s longstanding Explorers Program.
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Exercise Keeps Astronaut Hearts in Fighting Shape for the Journey to Mars
Getting a human body to Mars will take a toll on it. NASA and other space agencies have been concerned for years that the 6-9 month travel time to get to the Red Planet could have such a deleterious impact on human anatomy that any crewed mission would fail before it even began. But a new study, co-led by Dr. Benjamin Levine of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and published in the journal Circulation, eases some of that concern by claiming that, given a sufficient exercise regimen in low gravity, astronauts should be able to operate on Mars upon arrival without any major cardiac issues.
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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.
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ESA And JAXA's Planetary Defense Mission Powers On For The First Time
There’s a once-in-a-millennia astronomical opportunity coming up in about three years, and space agencies are rushing to make sure they’re ready for it. On Friday April 13th, 2029, the asteroid 99942 Apophis will fly within 32,000km of the Earth’s surface. The cruise liner sized piece of rock won’t hit us, but it should put on a great show, and, given the date it will pass by, is sure to cause panic amongst some parts of western civilization. One of the missions planned to watch this historic event (and hopefully alleviate some people’s fears) - ESA and JAXA’s Rapid Apophis Mission for Space Safety (Ramses) - has just passed a successful development milestone - turning on its computer for the first time.
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Stanford Engineers Teach Spacecraft to "Dream" Their Way to the Space Station
Docking with the ISS may seem simple. However, actually doing so is a showcase in how difficult orbital mechanics can be. It’s equivalent to traveling down a highway at 28,000 km/hr and parallel parking into an open garage on a multi-billion dollar laboratory traveling at the same speed. If you try to accelerate forward you actually drift up, and there’s no air friction to naturally slow you down. Oh, and if you hit the lab, everyone onboard both your craft and the station dies, and the resultant debris field could both wipe out dozens of satellites and even people on the ground. No pressure, obviously. For decades, aerospace engineers have been docking successfully using hard coded physics equations and human pilots to correct them. But now, a new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv from researchers at Stanford, is taking a shot at building an AI to perform a series of “mental simulations” that could fundamentally change how future spacecraft interact with each other.
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JUICE Mission to Swing by Earth on September 28
The European Space Agency’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) will return to Earth on 28 September, with flight controllers guiding the spacecraft close to our home planet to alter its speed and direction en route to Jupiter.
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How Diffractive Solar Sails Could Stop a Killer Asteroid at 100 km/s
Asteroids don’t come with a warning label that they might one day hit Earth. While we don’t know of any currently on course to do so, we are finding thousands of new ones each year, and there’s always a potential that one could. We proved a viable technique for dealing with that eventuality - the DART mission successfully moved a small asteroid using a “kinetic impactor” - basically a big rod designed to push the asteroid off its trajectory. But DART had one big flaw - it was traveling in the same direction as the asteroid, and approached it from behind, eventually hitting it with an impactor launched while in orbit around it. That technique might work if we have enough warning, but would require years of orbital mechanical maneuvering to pull off. An alternative, proposed by researchers at Beihang University, is to use a new type of solar sail to deflect a potentially hazardous asteroid by hitting it head on.