Andy Tomaswick

Recent Articles

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  The Archeologist's Guide To Colonizing Other Worlds

  November 10, 2025

  Models help scientists understand everything from the particles that make up the universe to massive superstructures of galaxies at the beginning of time. But sometimes they model more mundane, though perhaps even more complex, features - including the course of human civilization. A new paper by Thomas Leppard of the International Archaeological Research Institute and his co-authors, all of whom are also archeologists, propose applying a model of how humans expanded to the different islands across the Pacific Ocean during their early migration to what glean insights into how humanity should manage our colonization of space.

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  Cosmic Dust Bunnies - Why the Universe Might Be Fluffier Than We Thought

  November 10, 2025

  Space dust provides more than just awe-inspiring pictures like the Pillars of Creation. It can provide the necessary materials to build everything from planets to asteroids. But what it actually looks like, especially in terms of its “porosity” (i.e. how many holes it has) has been an area of debate for astrochemists for decades. A new paper from Alexey Potapov of Friedrich Schiller University Jena and his co-authors suggest that the dust that makes up so much of the universe might be “spongier” than originally thought.

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  Why the Milky Way’s Dark Heart Might Be Shaped Like a Box

  November 10, 2025

  Back in 2009, astronomers using the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope noticed that there was a lot more gamma-ray light coming from the center of the Milky Way than might otherwise be expected given the objects there. Since then, two theories have appeared to explain this Galactic Center Excess (GCE) as it’s become known. One theory posits that the extra gamma rays are created by thousands of unseen milli-second pulsars (MSPs) in the Galactic center, while the other suggests that dark matter annihilating itself could also be the source. A new paper from Moortis Muru and hisco-authors at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) hasn’t necessarily solved the conundrum, but does level the playing field between the two theories again.

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  Euclid Has 8 Extra Years of Fuel. A Scientist Has A Brilliant Plan To Use It.

  November 08, 2025

  It’s almost become expected that many space telescopes and probes can have “extended missions”. Both Voyagers are still sending data back 40+ years after their 5-year primary mission ended. But figuring out what to do with those spacecraft after their primary mission takes some negotiation. One such craft that will reach its end-of-mission in 2030 is Euclid, which is currently on a mission to map the “dark universe” of dark energy and dark matter. According to a new paper from Luigi “Rolly” Bedin of the Astronomical Institute of Padova, which is available in pre-print form on arXiv, for its second act we could turn Euclid into the most powerful astrometric telescope ever made.

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  The "Anti-Weather" Of Venus

  November 07, 2025

  Conditions on Venus’ surface have largely remained a mystery for decades. Carl Sagan famously pointed out that people were quick to jump to conclusions, such as that there are dinosaurs living there, from scant little evidence collected from the planet. But just because we have little actual data doesn’t mean we can’t draw conclusions, and better yet models, from the data we do have. A new paper from Maxence Lefèvre of the Sorbonne and his colleagues takes what little data has been collected from Venus’ surface and uses it to valid a model of what the wind and dust conditions down there would be like - all for the sake of making the work of the next round of Venusian explorer easier.

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  Taking The Moon's Temperature With Beeswax

  November 04, 2025

  Sometimes space exploration doesn’t go as planned. But even in failure, engineers can learn, adapt, and try again. One of the best ways to do that is to share the learning, and allow others to reproduce the work that might not have succeeded, allowing them to try again. A group from MIT’s Space Enabled Research Group, part of its Media Lab, recently released a paper in Space Science Reviews that describes the design and testing results of a pair of passive sensors sent to the Moon on the ill-fated Rashid-1 rover.

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  Magnetic Forces Funnel Gas And Dust Into Young Stars

  November 03, 2025

  Star formation has a lot of complex physics that feed into it. Classical models used something equivalent to a “collapse” of a cloud of gas by gravity, with a star being birthed in the middle. More modern understandings show a feature called a “streamer”, which funnels gas and dust to proto-stars from the surrounding disc of material. But our understanding of those streamers is still in its early stages, like the stars they are forming. So a new paper published in Astrophysical Journal Letters by Pablo Cortes of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) and his co-authors is a welcome addition to the literature - and it shows a unique feature of the process for the first time.

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  We Could Use Neutrino Detectors As Giant Particle Colliders

  November 03, 2025

  There is a limit to how big we can build particle colliders on Earth, whether that is because of limited space or limited economics. Since size is equivalent to energy output for particle colliders, that also means there’s a limit to how energetic we can make them. And again, since high energies are required to test theories that go Beyond the Standard Model (BSM) of particle physics, that means we will be limited in our ability to validate those theories until we build a collider big enough. But a team of scientists led by Yang Bai at the University of Wisconsin thinks they might have a better idea - use already existing neutrino detectors as a large scale particle collider that can reach energies way beyond what the LHC is capable of.

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  We're Putting Lots Of Transition Metals Into The Stratosphere. That's Not Good.

  October 30, 2025

  We successfully plugged the hole in the ozone layer that was discovered in the 1980s by banning ozone depleting substances such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). But, it seems we might be unintentionally creating another potential atmospheric calamity by using the upper atmosphere to destroy huge constellations of satellites after a very short (i.e. 5 year) lifetime. According to a new paper by Leonard Schulz of the Technical University of Braunschweig and his co-authors, material from satellites that burn up in the atmosphere, especially transition metals, could have unforeseen consequences on atmospheric chemistry - and we’re now the biggest contributor of some of those elements.

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  A Second Instrument On HWO Could Track Down Nearby Earth-Size Planets

  October 29, 2025

  The Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) is slated to be the next Great Observatory for the world. Its main focus has been searching for biosignatures in the atmospheres of at least 25 Earth-like exoplanets. However, to do that, it will require a significant amount of effort with only a coronagraph, the currently planned primary instrument, no matter how powerful that coronagraph is. As new paper from Fabien Malbet of the University of Grenoble Alpes and his co-authors suggest an improvement - add a second instrument to HWO’s payload that will be able to astrometrically track planets down to a precision of .5 micro-arcseconds (µas). That would allow HWO to detect Earth-size planets around hundreds of nearby stars - dramatically increasing the number of potential candidates for atmospheric analysis.

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  Many Asteroid Rotations Are Chaotic. A New Model Helps Explain Them.

  October 28, 2025

  Asteroids spin. Most of them do so rather slowly, and up until now most theories of asteroid rotation have failed to explain exactly why. A new paper from Wen-Han Zhou at the University of Tokyo and his co-authors might finally be able to fully explain that mystery as well as a few others related to asteroid rotation. Their work was presented at the Joint Meeting of the Europlanet Science Congress and the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Science in late September and could impact our understanding of how best to defend against a potentially hazardous asteroid.

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  Teach-And-Repeat Driving Could Automate Lunar Cargo Delivery

  October 24, 2025

  Driving on the Moon for the first time has got to be an exhilarating experience. But driving the same path on the Moon for the 500th time probably won’t be nearly as exciting to whatever poor astronaut got stuck with that duty for the day. With that in mind, a team of researchers led by PhD student Alec Krawciw and Professor Tim Barfoot of the University of Toronto are working on a way to automate the mundane task of driving goods back and forth from a lunar landing site to a nascent lunar exploration base.

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  Are We In The Solitude Zone Of The Universe?

  October 24, 2025

  Are we alone? It’s probably one of the, if not the most basic questions of human existence. People have been trying to answer it for millennia in one form or another, but only recently have we gained the tools and knowledge to start tractably trying to estimate whether we are or not. Those efforts take the form of famous tools like the Fermi Paradox and the Drake Equation, but there’s always room for a more nuanced understanding. A new paper in Acta Astronautica from Antal Veres of the Hungarian University of Agriculture introduces a new one - The Solitude Zone.

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  ESA Is Simulating A Solar Storms For Satellite Operator Training

  October 24, 2025

  Threats from space aren’t always obvious, but statistically its only a matter of time before one of them happens. One of the most concerning for many space experts is a massive solar storm, like the one that literally lit telegraph paper on fire when it hit back in 1859. In the last 150 years our technology has improved by leaps and bounds, but that also means it's much more susceptible to damage if another event like the “Carrington Event”, as the storm in 1859 is called. Estimates for potential damage range into the trillions of dollars, with full economic recovery taking well over a decade if something isn’t done to mitigate the damage beforehand. As part of that preparedness, the European Space Agency (ESA) has started requiring the operational crew of new satellites, which would be on the frontlines of any solar storm catastrophe, to simulate how they would handle such an event, as described in a recent press release focused on one of those simulations.

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  Hera And Europa Clipper Will Pass Through 3I/ATLAS' Tail

  October 21, 2025

  All sorts of crazy things have been suggested regarding 3I/ATLAS, the third known interstellar object that we’ve discovered. Some are simply conspiracy theories about it being an alien spacecraft, while others have been well-thought out suggestions, like using Martian-based probes to observe the comet as it streaked past the red planet. A new paper pre-published on arXiv and accepted for publication by the Research Notes of the American Astronomical Society by Samuel Grand and Geraint Jones, of the Finnish Meteorological Institute and ESA respectively, falls into the latter category, and suggests utilizing two spacecraft already en route to their separate destinations to potentially detect ions from the object’s spectacular tail that has formed as it approaches the Sun.

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  What Do We Do If SETI Is Successful?

  October 20, 2025

  The Search For Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is evolving. We’ve moved on from the limited thinking of monitoring radio waves to checking for interstellar pushing lasers or even budding Dyson swarms around stars. To match our increased understanding of the ways we might find intelligence elsewhere in the galaxy, the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) is working through an update to its protocols for what researchers should do after a confirmed detection of intelligence outside of Earth. Their new suggestions are available in a pre-print paper on arXiv, but were also voted on at the 2025 International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Sydney, with potential full adoption early next year.

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  Constraints On Solar Power Satellites Are More Ground-Based Than Space-Based

  October 19, 2025

  Space-based solar power has been gaining more and more traction recently. The recent success of Caltech’s Space Solar Power Project, which demonstrated the feasibility of transmitting power from space to the ground, has been matched by a number of pilot projects throughout the world, all of which are hoping to tap into some of the almost unlimited and constant solar energy that is accessible up in geostationary orbit (GEO). But, according to a new paper from a group of Italian and German researchers, there are plenty of constraints on getting that power down here to Earth - and most of them are more logistical than technical.

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  Starship Could Cut The Travel Time To Uranus In Half

  October 18, 2025

  The ice giants remain some of the most interesting places to explore in the solar system. Uranus in particular has drawn a lot of interest lately, especially after the 2022 Decadal Survey from the National Academies named it as the highest priority destination. But as of now, we still don’t have a fully fleshed out and planned mission ready to go for the multiple launch windows in the 2030s. That might actually be an advantage, though, as a new system coming online might change the overall mission design fundamentally. Starship recently continued its recent string of successful tests, and a new paper presented at the IEEE Aerospace Conference by researchers at MIT looked at how this new, much more capable launch system, could impact the development of the Uranus Orbiter and Probe (UOP) that the Decadal Survey suggested.

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  Foldable Solar Sails Could Help With Aerobraking and Atmospheric Reentry

  October 15, 2025

  Use cases for smart materials in space exploration keep cropping up everywhere. They are used in everything from antenna deployments on satellites to rover deformation and reformation. One of the latest ideas is to use them to transform the solar sails that could primarily be used as a propulsion system for a mission into a heat shield when that mission reaches its final destination. A new paper from Joseph Ivarson and Davide Guzzetti, both of Auburn’s Department of Aerospace Engineering, and published in Acta Astronautica, describes how the idea might work and lists some potential applications exploring various parts of the solar system.

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  Modular Robots Could Both Explore Off-World And Build Infrastructure

  October 14, 2025

  Modularity is taking off in more ways than one in space exploration. The design of the upcoming “Lunar Gateway” space station is supposed to be modular, with different modules being supplied by different organizations. In an effort to extend that thinking down to rovers on the ground, a new paper from researchers at Germany’s space agency (DLR), developed an architecture where a single, modular rover could be responsible for both exploration and carrying payloads around the Moon or Mars.