Space missions and spacecraft
In a recent paper, UCSB physicist Jack Kingdon identified a trajectory for a rapid transit (90 days) to Mars using SpaceX's Starship. This proposal offers an alternative to mission architectures that rely on nuclear propulsion to reduce transit times.
China's Tianwen-2 mission blasted off on Wednesday, embarking on an epic 8-year journey that will help to unlock the secrets of an asteroid and a comet before delivering the precious cargo back to Earth. The spacecraft will first hunt down Kamoʻoalewa (asteroid 2016 HO3) which it will study for a year, extracting samples from its surface. After returning the sample to Earth, Tianwen-2 will head back out into the Solar System taking another 7 years to intercept the main belt comet 311P/Pan-STARRS. It will undertake a flyby study of this object that has never been studied before.
On May 10th, while striking a selfie to mark its 1,500th day on Mars, NASA's Perseverance Rover got an unexpected guest star—a towering dust devil swirling in the distance photobombed the shot. The rover was on Witch Hazel Hill, an area on the rim of Jezero Crater that it has been exploring for the last 5 months. The dust devil on the other hand was sneaking into the background from a distance of 5 km away. The selfie image was made up of 59 separate photos taken by the rover using its WATSON camera.
Multi-messenger astronomy has been all the rage lately. It involves capturing data on the gravitational and electromagnetic signals from catastrophic cosmic events. However, with that newfound interest comes required updates to infrastructure. Gravitational wave detectors have been upgraded and will be even more sensitive soon. But to realize the promise of multi-messenger astronomy, scientists must have a fleet of spacecraft watching the entire sky for high-energy signals indicative of the events that cause gravitational waves. At least, that is the team's long-term plan behind the High Energy Rapid Modular Ensemble of Satellites Pathfinder (HERMES-PF) mission, which successfully launched in March and is currently undergoing commissioning.
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.
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.
Sometimes it's fun to look back at old missions that never were. There are more of those than the missions that receive funding and are launched, but many of those were influenced by the ones that were funded that came before. A great fountain of mission ideas is the Alpbach Summer School, held annually in Austria. Every year, at least two teams publish papers defining a complete mission concept as part of their capstone experience at the school. One published in 2014 describes a mission designed to look at Venus' tectonic activity, and even though the concept is over 11 years old, the scientific questions it sought to answer are still outstanding today.
Spacecraft are expensive and intricately engineered machines designed to perform complex missions in harsh space environments. They're costly and require a long time to design and build. Due to their uniqueness and high value, and the need to keep them sterilized, they're assembled in cleanrooms that limit the amount of dust and microbes. New research shows that microbes are adapting to these clean rooms and learning how to thrive in them.
Technology Readiness Levels (or TRL levels, because repeating the last word of initialisms is common in English) is a metric commonly used by NASA to define how developed a technology for use on a mission is. These typically range from 1-9, with 1 being an idea in someone's head, and 9 having been successfully flown on a mission. One of the assessments of new projects that NASA does is a check of the TRL levels of its constituent components - those with a higher level get higher marks, since it is assumed that the technology necessary to get them ready will require less work. So, sometimes, NASA and other organizations will sponsor smaller missions to work on a specific technology needed for one of its big flagship programs. That seems to be the approach from a team led by Keri Hoadley of the University of Florida, who recently laid out a mission concept for the Ultraviolet Type Ia Supernova CubeSat (UVIa).
Getting a probe to the Icy Giant planets takes some time - a journey to Uranus could take as long as 13 years, even with a gravity assist from Jupiter. However, several ideas are in the works to speed up that process, especially given the increased interest in sending a probe their way. One of those ideas is to use an aerocapture system to slow a probe down once it reaches its intended target. A new paper from Andrew Gomez-Delrio and their co-authors at NASA's Langley Research Center describes how a proposed Uranus Orbiter and Probe (UOP) mission could utilize the same aerocapture technology that Curiosity used to dramatically improve both the speed and payload capacity of the mission.
ESA's Plato Mission just hit a major milestone: 24 of 26 high-tech cameras have now been mounted and will soon be ready to hunt. This isn't your average telescope; it's a planet-spotting powerhouse designed to catch distant worlds passing in front of their stars. The clever camera arrangement creates a cosmic wide-angle lens, scanning a massive 5% of the entire sky in one go. No other planet-hunter comes close to this field of view.
NASA's Perseverance Rover landed in Jezero Crater, an ancient impact crater that was probably filled with water for a long time. During its exploration, the rover has discovered volcanic rocks on the crater floor, but the original source hasn't been found. Now, a team of researchers thinks there's a composite volcano right on the edge of Jezero Crater. They identify a conical-shaped structure that rises about 2 km above the surrounding plains.
On May 7th, the Japanese space exploration company ispace announced that its HAKUTO-R RESILIENCE lander entered lunar orbit after completing a 9-minute thruster burn. It's now in a stable lunar orbit, and operators will spend the next month testing and preparing for its landing attempt on June 5. This is the company's second attempt at landing on the Moon, after the first attempt crashed in 2023. It's carrying a micro-rover and several science experiments.
NASA's Psyche mission is on its way to explore a metal-rich asteroid in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. All was going well since its launch in October 2023 until nasa announced a decrease in fuel pressure for the propulsion system. It uses a solar electric propulsion system, generating thrust with four electric ion engines that expel xenon ions, giving the spacecraft a gentle nudge in the opposite direction. It has been firing its thrusters continuously since May 2024, but in April 2025, engineers detected the pressure drop. Thankfully they have redundancy built in but are still troubleshooting the issue.
When ISS astronauts return home, they have a hot ride back to Earth's surface. It's been that way since the beginning of human spaceflight to orbital space and beyond. The incoming vehicle uses friction with Earth's atmosphere to slow down to a safe landing speed. The "hot ride" part comes because that friction builds up high temperatures on the spacecraft's "skin". Without protection, the searing heat of atmospheric re-entry could destroy it. This same heating happens to incoming meteoroids as they whip through Earth's atmosphere.
On 20 April, 2025, the African Space Agency (AfSA) was formally launched at an inauguration ceremony in Cairo, Egypt. The decision to create AfSA was made by the African Union (AU) in 2016 to coordinate the continent's approach to space, and enact the African Space Policy and Strategy. AfSA will coordinate African space cooperation with Europe and other international partners.
What methods can be employed to send a spacecraft to Uranus despite the former's immense distance from Earth? This is what a recent study presented at the 56th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference hopes to address as a team of scientists investigated ways to cut the travel time to the second most distant planet from the Sun. This study has the potential to help scientists, engineers, and mission planners develop low-cost and novel techniques for deep space travel while conducting cutting-edge science.
Space exploration not only allows us to look out into the universe but it also allows us to look back at Earth. ESA's Biomass satellite will measure the amount of carbon in the world's forests, tracking how the carbon cycle absorbs and releases carbon over the seasonal cycles. It launched this week from the Kourou Spaceport in French Guiana atop a Vega-C rocket and safely reached its intended orbit. It has a synthetic aperture radar that can penetrate forest canopies like an infrared telescope can peer through dark dust clouds.
Getting missions to land successfully on the Moon has been difficult. Recent missions, such as IM-1 and IM-2, which the private company Intuitive Machines completed, have been qualified successes at best, with both landers settling at unintended angles and breaking parts of them off along the way. Such experiences offer excellent learning opportunities, though, and NASA is confident that a third time might be a charm for a flawless mission. There will be a lot riding on IM-3, the third Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) mission, including a set of rovers and ground station for a NASA experiment called the Cooperative Autonomous Distribution Robotic Exploration (CADRE), which recently passed its Verification and Validation (V&V) test for one of it's most essential parts. This software architecture handles tasks for each rover and binds them into a cohesive whole.
How can walking robots deliver more efficient in-situ robotic exploration on the Moon compared to other types of robots? This is what a recent study presented at the 56th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference hopes to address as a team of researchers from the University of Southern California (USC) discussed the benefits of using legged robots for lunar exploration regarding gait speed (walking speed). This study has the potential to help engineers, scientists, mission planners, and astronauts develop novel robotic designs to conduct more efficient science and mission objectives on future Moon surface missions.
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