A Novel Concept for a Multiplanetary Crewed Mission to Mars and Ceres

By Matthew Williams April 23, 2025
In a recent paper, a team of commercial space engineers proposed a Human-Crewed Interplanetary Transport Architecture (HUCITAR) to explore Mars and Ceres in a single journey. Their ambitious plan envisions six astronauts spending 4 years and seven months exploring these bodies, which could be ready to launch by 2035.
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Seeing the Waves that Make the Sun's Corona So Hot

By Brian Koberlein April 23, 2025
If you happen to be enjoying a sunny day, thank the bright surface of the Sun, known as the photosphere. At a piping hot temperature of about 5,800 K, the photosphere provides nearly all the sunlight Earth receives. But for all its glorious radiance, the photosphere isn't the hottest part of the Sun. That award goes to the diffuse outer atmosphere of the Sun known as the corona, which has a temperature of more than a million Kelvin. Parts of the corona can be as hot as 20 million Kelvin, which is hotter than the Sun's core. Of course, the big mystery is why the corona is so hot.
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Scientists Ask For Help Classifying Galaxies From the Cosmic Noon

By Andy Tomaswick April 23, 2025
Data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is coming in hot and heavy at this point, with various data streams from multiple instruments being reported in various papers. One exciting one will be released shortly in the Astrophysical Journal from researchers at the University of Kansas (KU), where researchers collected mid-infrared images of a part of the sky that holds galaxies from the time of the "cosmic noon" about 10 billion years ago. Their paper describes this survey and invites citizen scientists to help catalogue and classify some of their findings.
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This Distant Exoplanet is Melting Away and Leaving a Comet-like Tail

By Evan Gough April 23, 2025
If we need more evidence that our Solar System is not representative of other solar systems, take a look at BD+05 4868. It's a binary star consisting of a K-dwarf and an M-dwarf about 140 light-years away. It's not just the binary star sets the system apart from ours. A small rocky planet is so close to the primary star that it's being vaporized, leaving a trail of debris like a comet.
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However Life Got Started on Earth, it Didn't Take Long

By Evan Gough April 23, 2025
At some early point in Earth's history, a collection of increasingly complex chemicals performed a new trick. They transformed themselves somehow into an energy-producing and self-replicating cell. The timing of this critical moment in Earth's history is hidden behind the haze of billions of years.
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What Do Famous Astronomical Objects Look Like... in 3D?

By David Dickinson April 23, 2025
It’s a cosmic shame, that we tend to only see flat-looking, 2-dimensional views of deep-sky objects. And while we can’t just zoom out past the Andromeda galaxy for another perspective, or see the Crab Nebula from another vantage point in space, we can use existing data to simulate objects in 3D. A recent collection released by Marshall Space Flight Center’s Chandra X-ray Center and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics shows us familiar objects in a new way.
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Chinese Engineers Used Gravitational Slingshots to Rescue a Pair of Satellites

By Matthew Williams April 22, 2025
When China's DRO-A and B satellites were launched, their rocket failed to deliver them to their planned orbit. Even worse, the satellites were spinning out of control, unable to properly charge their solar panels. Engineers realized that there was still a way to put them on course again. They executed a series of gravitational slingshots over 123 days, using the Sun, Earth, and the Moon to raise the spacecraft's orbits and put them into their proper trajectory.
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Jupiter's Atmosphere is a Wild Place

By Carolyn Collins Petersen April 22, 2025
A cross section of the upper atmosphere, or troposphere, of Jupiter, showing the depth of storms in a north-south swath that crosses the planet’s equator, or equatorial zone (EZ). Blue and red represent, respectively, higher and lower than normal abundances of ammonia gas. Chris Moeckel, UC Berkeley
The weather gets a little wild and weird on Jupiter. How wild? Spacecraft instruments have measured strong winds, tracked fierce lightning, and found huge methane plume storms rising from deep beneath the clouds. How weird? Think: mushballs raining down like hailstones. They're made of ammonia and water encased in a water ice shell. According to planetary scientists, these mushballs plunge through the Jovian atmosphere. What's more, they probably form on the other gas and ice giants, too.
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