13 Rovers Recently Competed to Scour the (Simulated) Moon to Harvest Resources

Challenges are one way to encourage innovation. They’ve been leveraged by numerous space and non-space research organizations in the last decade, with varying degrees of success. The European Space Agency (ESA) is now getting in on the action, with a challenge to prospect the moon for vital resources that will make a sustainable presence there possible. Recently thirteen teams from all over the continent (and Canada) competed in a gloomy hall in the Erasmus Innovation Centre in the Netherlands.

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A Suctioning Sleeping bag Could Solve eye Problems in Space

As any good cardiologist would tell you, blood flow is key to your health.  They probably won’t tell you that gravity is key to blood flow.  But that’s probably because they don’t usually have to deal with patients that aren’t subject to gravity.  When people are no longer subject to gravity, such as astronauts resident on the ISS, that lack of gravity can become a problem, especially when dealing with sensitive soft tissues such as the eyes.  To solve that problem, a team of scientists and engineers have the University of Texas Southwestern have developed a special type of sleeping bag that might help astronauts with their blood flow issues caused by gravity, and potentially get their sight back.

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Galaxy Found With Twin Supermassive Black Holes

Another view of NGC 7727 from the Very Large Telescope, taken in 2021. Credit: ESO.

For literally being black in the truest sense of the word, black holes are surprisingly easy to spot.  Astronomers have spent decades at this point purposely searching for them and have found thousands already, with potentially 100 billion existing in our part of the universe.  We are still finding new types and configurations of black holes consistently.  Now, new research led by Dr. Karina Voggel of the Strasbourg Observatory found a pair of black holes that hold the new records of being both the closest supermassive black hole pair to Earth and the closest together pair ever seen.

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Gravitational Waves Could Explain why There’s More Matter Than Antimatter in the Universe

One of the questions underpinning both philosophy and science is “why are we here”?  Ask an astrophysicist, and they might answer with an imbalance between matter and antimatter at the beginning of the universe.  While that is a (relatively) simple explanation, it then begs the question – why was there an imbalance in the first place?  Scientists have been seeking ways to test various theories regarding that imbalance but have come up empty-handed so far. Now, a team of theoretical physicists think they might have found a way to test some of those theories using gravitational waves.

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A Spacecraft Orbiting the Moon Just Captured an Image of Saturn

Cameras can be finicky – especially ones primarily used for astronomy.  When used for a purpose other than their intended one, sometimes they result in horribly muddled or blurry images.  However, sometimes an image works out just right and provides a whole new perspective on a familiar scene.  That’s what happened recently when the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) turned one of its cameras toward one of astronomy’s favorite places – Saturn.

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M87’s Supermassive Black Hole is Spewing out a Spiraling jet of Material

Patterns in nature often occur in more than one place.  Spirals, symmetry, and chaos all impact natural phenomena, from the shape of a shell to the course of a river.  So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that one of the most famous and fundamental shapes from biology also appears in astrophysics. Yes, scientists have found a double-helix structure in the magnetic field of M87.  And it looks just like a super enlarged DNA strand.

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Not Just Water, There Could be Frozen Carbon Dioxide on the Moon too

Despite all its wonderful properties, water isn’t the only resource needed for space exploration.  Carbon is another important ingredient for many necessary materials, such as steel, rocket fuel, and biomaterials.  Therefore, proponents of lunar exploration should be excited by a recent study led by Dr. Norbert Schorghofer of the Planetary Science Institute that found natural “cold traps” for carbon dioxide in some of the permanently shadowed craters of the moon.

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Company Tests Iodine Thruster in Space for the First Time

Ion thrusters have played second fiddle to chemical rockets for most of the history of space exploration.  Part of that is because of their inability to launch payloads into orbit.  But in space, their high thrust-to-weight ratio has plenty of appeal.  Other features have held the technology back, including the difficulty of working with the thruster’s fuel source – xenon.  Now, a team of engineers and scientists from ThrustMe, a French start-up that focuses on developing advanced propulsions systems, have developed an ion thruster that works on an entirely new and much easier to use material – iodine.

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The Gamow Explorer Would be a new Gamma-ray Observatory to Search for the First Stars in the Universe… as They Explode

Gamma rays are useful for more than just turning unassuming scientists into green-skinned behemoths.  They can also shine a light on the deaths of some of the earliest stars in the universe.  More accurately, they are some of the light caused by the deaths of the earliest stars in the universe.  Now, a team of scientists led by Nicholas White of George Washington University, and formerly of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, has proposed an observatory mission that would scan the sky for evidence of Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) and use them to understand the early universe.

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