Andy Tomaswick, Author at Universe Today

July 27, 2024July 27, 2024 by Andy Tomaswick

Floating LEAVES Could Characterize Venus’s Atmosphere

Venus’s atmosphere has drawn a lot of attention lately. In particular, the consistent discovery of phosphine in its clouds points to potential biological sources. That, in turn, has resulted in numerous suggested missions, including floating a balloon into the atmosphere or having a spacecraft scoop down and suck up atmospheric samples. But a team of engineers led by Jeffrey Balcerski, now an adjunct at Kent State University but then part of the Ohio Aerospace Institute, came up with a different idea years ago – use floating sensor platforms shaped like leaves to collect a wide variety of data throughout Venus’ atmosphere.

July 24, 2024July 24, 2024 by Andy Tomaswick

A Pair of CubeSats Using Ground Penetrating Radar Could Map The Interior of Near Earth Asteroids

This illustration shows the ESA's Hera spacecraft and its two CubeSats at the binary asteroid Didymos. Image Credit: ESA

Characterizing near-Earths asteroids (NEAs) is critical if we hope to eventually stop one from hitting us. But so far, missions to do so have been expensive, which is never good for space exploration. So a team led by Patrick Bambach of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany developed a mission concept that utilizes a relatively inexpensive 6U CubeSat (or, more accurately, two of them) to characterize the interior of NEAs that would cost only a fraction of the price of previous missions.

July 23, 2024July 23, 2024 by Andy Tomaswick

Producing Oxygen From Rock Is Harder In Lower Gravities

One of the challenges engineers face when developing technologies for use in space is that of different gravities. Mostly, engineers only have access to test beds that reflect either Earth’s normal gravity or, if they’re fortunate, the microgravity of the ISS. Designing and testing systems for the reduced, but not negligible, gravity on the Moon and Mars is much more difficult. But for some systems, it is essential. One such system is electrolysis, the process by which explorers will make oxygen for astronauts to breathe on a permanent Moon or Mars base, as well as critical ingredients like hydrogen for rocket fuel. To help steer the development of systems that will work in those conditions, a team of researchers led by computational physicist Dr. Paul Burke of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory decided to turn to a favorite tool of scientists everywhere: models.

July 22, 2024July 22, 2024 by Andy Tomaswick

Moon Dust Could Contaminate Lunar Explorers’ Water Supply

Water purification is a big business on Earth. Companies offer everything from desalination to providing just the right pH level for drinking water. But on the Moon, there won’t be a similar technical infrastructure to support the astronauts attempting to make a permanent base there. And there’s one particular material that will make water purification even harder – Moon dust.

July 19, 2024July 19, 2024 by Andy Tomaswick

Lunar Infrastructure Could Be Protected By Autonomously Building A Rock Wall

Lunar exploration equipment at any future lunar base is in danger from debris blasted toward it by subsequent lunar landers. This danger isn’t just theoretical – Surveyor III was a lander during the Apollo era that was damaged by Apollo 12’s descent rocket and returned to Earth for closer examination. Plenty of ideas have been put forward to limit this risk, and we’ve reported on many of them, from constructing landing pads out of melted regolith to 3D printing a blast shield out of available materials. But a new paper from researchers in Switzerland suggests a much simpler idea – why not just build a blast wall by stacking a bunch of rocks together?

July 18, 2024July 18, 2024 by Andy Tomaswick

Swarming Satellites Could Autonomous Characterize an Asteroid

An asteroid’s size, shape, and rotational speed are clues to its internal properties and potential resources for mining operations. However, of the more than 20,000 near-Earth asteroids currently known, only a tiny fraction have been sufficiently characterized to estimate those three properties accurately. That is essentially a resource constraint – there aren’t enough dedicated telescopes on Earth to keep track of all the asteroids for long enough to characterize them, and deep space resources, such as the Deep Space Network required for communications outside Earth’s orbit, are already overutilized by other missions. Enter the Autonomous Nanosatellite Swarming (ANS) mission concept, developed by Dr. Simone D’Amico and his colleagues at Stanford’s Space Rendezvous Laboratory.

July 17, 2024July 17, 2024 by Andy Tomaswick

Webb Measures the Weather on a Tidally Locked Exoplanet

Exploring exoplanet atmospheres in more detail was one task that planetary scientists anticipated during the long wait while the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was in development. Now, their patience is finally paying off. News about discoveries of exoplanet atmosphere using data from JWST seems to be coming from one research group or another almost every week, and this week is no exception. A paper published in Nature by authors from a few dozen institutions describes the atmospheric differences between the “morning” and “evening” sides of a tidally locked planet for the first time.

July 16, 2024July 16, 2024 by Andy Tomaswick

Only Hubble Could Make this Measurement of a Supernova

Calculating the distance to far-away objects, such as galaxy clusters and quasars, is difficult. But it is also critical to our understanding of how the universe evolves. Luckily, humanity has a trusty workhorse that has been collecting data for such calculations for decades—Hubble. It is by far the best telescope suited to the job, as described by a recent NASA press release about a distance measurement to a supernova in a nearby galaxy.

July 15, 2024July 15, 2024 by Andy Tomaswick

A Walking Balloon Could One Day Explore Titan – Or Earth’s Sea Floor

Novel ways to move on other celestial bodies always draw the attention of the space exploration community. Here at UT, we’ve reported on everything from robots that suspend themselves from the walls of Martian caves to robots that hop using jets of locally mined gas. But we haven’t yet reported on the idea of a balloon that “walks.” But that is the idea behind the BALloon Locomotion for Extreme Terrain, or BALLET, a project from Hari Nayar, a Principal Roboticist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and his colleagues.

July 12, 2024July 12, 2024 by Andy Tomaswick

A Hopping Robot Could Explore Europa Using Locally Harvested Water

Various forms of hopping robots have crept into development for us[e in different space exploration missions. We’ve reported on their use on asteroids and even our own Moon. But a study funded by NASA’s Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) in 2018 planned a mission to a type of world where hopping may not be as noticeable an advantage—Europa.