As humanity heads back to the Moon, a silent danger lurks: exhaust plumes from multiple spacecraft will blast lunar dust into orbit, creating a potentially deadly obstacle course for future missions. The solution will be to build landing pads on the lunar surface out of the lunar regolith. Researchers simulated landing pads just like these and their tests showed they could handle the heat and force of the propellant exhaust from a landing spacecraft. The techniques they found will minimise erosion over multiple landings.

Jupiter and its powerful gravity have played a major role in sculpting the Solar System. A new study provides a glimpse into Jupiter's primordial state, which could have implications for our understanding of how the Solar System evolved.

Members of the space exploration community are always coming up with novel ideas to solve problems that they view as holding back humanity's expansion into the cosmos. One such problem that has become more noticeable of late, due to the failure of several powered lunar landers, is the difficulty of landing on the Moon. To open up the wealth of resources on our nearest neighbor, we will have to regularly deliver cargo to it as well as ship cargo off of it. A new idea from Lunar Cargo, a company based in Europe, has come up with a novel, patented way to deliver cargo to the Moon - the Momentum Absorption Catcher for Express Deliveries on Non-Atmospheric Somata, or M.A.C.E.D.O.N.A.S.

Mars has fascinated us for centuries. Since the invention of the telescope, science fiction writers have mused over its habitability. Its location in the Solar System's habitable zone suggests it could, in theory, support life—despite lacking a global magnetic field and surface water. In a new paper, researchers propose that terraforming Mars is now an achievable goal. They outline methods for warming the planet, releasing pioneer species to build an ecosystem, and improving its atmosphere.

In recent years, humanity has visited several near-Earth asteroids (NEAs), including Ryugu (Hayabusa2) and Didymos (DART). However, we will need more frequent missions to start gathering more helpful information about this class of over 37,000 space rocks. CubeSats have off-the-shelf components and a relatively small size, making them a potentially good candidate for such an exploration program. But how would they reach these asteroid locations given their relatively limited payload and propulsion capacity? That is the focus of a new paper from Alessandro Quarta of the University of Pisa. He looks at potential trajectory planning for CubeSats given one of several configurations of ion drives. He shows how many NEAs can be accessed by simply entering a heliocentric orbit and awaiting the asteroid's arrival as part of its orbit.

It was big news years ago when Mars orbiters found streaks of what appeared to be water running down Martian cliffs and crater walls. Scientists worked hard to figure out what they were. Some proposed that they were seasonal streaks of briny ice, melting as the weak Mars summer arrived. New research says no to that.

Tracking exoplanets via orbital mechanics isn't easy. Plenty of variables could affect how a planet moves around its star, and determining which ones affect any given exoplanet requires a lot of data and a lot of modeling. A recent paper from researchers led by Kaviya Parthasarathy from National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan tries to break through the noise and determine what is causing the Transit Timing Variations (TTVs) of HAT-P-12b, more commonly known as Puli.

Extreme solar storms are a relatively rare event. However, as more and more of our critical infrastructure moves into space, they will begin to have more and more of an impact on our daily lives, rather than just providing an impressive light show at night. So it's best to know what's coming, and a new paper from an international team of researchers led by Kseniia Golubenko and Ilya Usoskin of the University of Oulu in Finalnd found a massive Extreme Solar Particle Event (ESPE) that happened 12350 years ago, which is now considered to be the most energetic on record.

Spacecraft orbiting Mars can reveal small features on the planet's surface, but there are only so many things you can see from above. When a meteor strikes the surface of Mars, it can excavate sub-surface material, allowing scientists to study what lies beneath. Researchers have simulated various impacts on Mars, changing the sub-surface material from bedrock to water-ice glaciers, and then calculated what should be visible after an impact, enabling new science.

Earth's magnetosphere channels particles from solar storms into stunning auroras. Mars lacks a planet-wide magnetic field and has patchy auroras barely detectable with instruments. Or so we thought. New images captured by NASA's Perseverance Rover with its Mastcam-Z instrument show green auroras in visible light. When humans finally walk on Mars and look to the skies, they could possibly see faint auroras there, too.