Space Exploration

Recent Articles

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  ESA's Hera Mission Targets Binary Asteroid Pair in November

  By David Dickinson - October 13, 2026

  In just one more month, the European Space Agency’s Hera mission will make history. Moving at 12 kilometers per second versus Earth, the mission is about to rendezvous with the binary Dimorphos-Didymos asteroid pair. NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission slammed into Dimorphos in 2022, and now Hera will provide a follow up view of the mission’s resulting handiwork. The European Space Agency (ESA) recently released a thought-provoking look at the perspectives of Hera, and what an astronaut might see from the surface of the asteroids as the mission speeds by.

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  How Will Water Flow on the Moon?

  By Andy Tomaswick - October 12, 2026

  Growing fresh food on the Moon is going to be crucial if astronauts there are ever going to eat anything other than freeze-dried rations. Since husbanding animals on the lunar surface is…difficult (to put it mildly), most mission planners believe that plants are the solution. But we still don’t entirely understand how one of the most fundamental materials to plant growth, water, operates under partial gravity. A team of researchers, led by Karl Hasenstein of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, and including John Kiss of the Florida Institute of Technology, and Christopher McKay of NASA’s Ames Research Center, recently published a paper in Microgravity Science and Technology that lays out the physics for how water behaves at lunar gravity.

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  Honda Wants to Put a Robotic Lab Assistant on Future Commercial Space Stations

  By Andy Tomaswick - October 11, 2026

  As I’m writing this I’m able to stare out into my driveway at my trusty Honda Odyssey. Most of the public’s association with Honda is through their “mobility” products - i.e. their cars. But the company has an impressive track record of other technical achievements, not the least of which has been in robotics. Now, it’s teaming up with space infrastructure firm Redwire to develop an automated laboratory support system for use on future commercial space stations.

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  To Keep GPS Constellations From Drifting, Look To The Moon

  By Andy Tomaswick - October 06, 2026

  Global Positioning Systems are a key feature in everyday life for much of the world’s population. Whether it’s ensuring a ship delivers its goods safely, or you’re able to avoid a road closure on your commute home, GPS can help. But the system has a weakness - it relies on ground stations that could suffer from blackouts, natural disasters, or cyber attacks. And if those ground stations go offline for long enough, the whole system itself can begin to “drift”. Aerospace engineers have been attempting to counteract this problem for years, but so far with little success. But a new paper from a research team led by Xia Lin and Baojun Lin at the Shanghai Engineering Center for Microsatellites, and published in Satellite Navigation, explains a potential answer to this problem - link the GPS satellites up with some in orbit around the Moon.

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  Space Radiation Sparks A Biological Cascade Of Cancer

  By Andy Tomaswick - October 05, 2026

  Deep space travel comes with a huge potential downside - radiation exposure that can kill an astronaut either quickly or slowly over time if not managed correctly. But what exactly does that mean, and is there any way to handle it other than sticking more and more protective layers between the squishy biological systems inside a spacecraft and the radiative void of deep space? A new paper from researchers at Oklahoma State University and the University of Texas Health Science Center hopes to answer both questions, and while the causes of radiation they point out are complex, they also offer some potential solutions as well.

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  Finding Life on Enceladus Could be Easier than We Thought, Says New Research

  By Matthew Williams - September 30, 2026

  Planetary scientists from Freie Universität Berlin have published two new studies that indicate that a spacecraft could identify evidence of life much more easily than previously thought.

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  Cornell Lightsail Experiment Paves the Way for Interstellar Missions

  By Matthew Williams - September 28, 2026

  Students in Cornell’s Space Systems Design Studio have published results from two lightsail experiments (Alpha CubeSat and Sailing to the Stars) built by engineering students at Cornell University.

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  A 1,000°C Lunar Microreactor Could Power the Next Era of Moon Bases

  By Andy Tomaswick - September 28, 2026

  As humanity continues to move towards a permanent settlement on the Moon, we still have at least one big hurdle to face - the lunar night, which lasts for roughly fourteen days straight and can drop temperatures to a bone-chilling -223°C. In order to survive those conditions, we need a power source that doesn’t come and go with the Sun, or rely on non-existent stock of coal, gas or wind. In other words, we need nuclear power, and a new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv by Julius Mercz of the Technical University of Munich and his co-authors, describes a new type of nuclear reactor that wouldn’t just power a habitat’s environmental systems, but also enable its materials extraction technologies as well.

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  Swiss Engineers Just Designed a Better 'Shock Absorber' for Spacecraft

  By Andy Tomaswick - September 24, 2026

  Rocket launches are some of the most violent travel methods man has ever created. They generate millions of pounds of thrust and convert that into intense g-forces. Humans must undergo serious training to withstand those experiences, but machines have to do so as well, but by design rather than training. If a delicate mirror or solder joint cracks before a multi-billion dollar satellite even begins its mission, the years of effort that went into its design and assembly could be lost. Now, researchers in Switzerland have come up with an ingenious way to make sure that is much less likely to happen.

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  First Diagnostic X-Rays in Space Mark New Era for Astronaut Health

  By Matthew Williams - September 23, 2026

  A team of researchers acquired the first diagnostic X-ray images during a commercial spaceflight, demonstrating that X-ray medicine can be performed in space.

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  MIT Research Could Lead to Refueling Depots on Mars

  By Matthew Williams - September 20, 2026

  MIT PhD candidate Lanie McKinney is developing technology to convert the chemicals in the Martian atmosphere into propellant to bring astronauts home.

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  Genetically Engineered Yeast Could Build the First Martian Outposts

  By Andy Tomaswick - September 17, 2026

  If we are ever to have a permanent presence on Mars, we will have to learn to build there. Shipping the material from Earth to build something as simple as a pressurized habitat is prohibitively expensive, so we will have to make sure of the materials available on Mars’ surface. A research team led by Ning Liu at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology recently published a paper in Chem Circularity that uses biology to do much of the heavy lifting for the structural materials we would typically use concrete for. If their method is adopted, we might quickly find another Earth-based lifeform in abundance on Mars - yeast.

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  A New Design For A Plasma Engine Fuels On Only Thin Air

  By Andy Tomaswick - September 12, 2026

  Choosing what orbit to put a satellite in always comes with trade-offs. When it comes to Very Low Earth Orbit (VLEO), between 100-450 km, there are distinct advantages. Remote sensing cameras can take better pictures, comms and radar require less power, and atmospheric drag will automatically clean up dead satellites. But there’s also a cost - air friction requires any satellite in this orbit to use an engine near constantly to stay in orbit, which in turn requires fuel - typically in the form of expensive gases like Xenon. So, as part of his PhD thesis at the University of Stuttgart, which is available in arXiv, Francesco Romano decided to solve that problem by using the very air molecules that cause that friction as fuel for a plasma engine to keep satellites aloft indefinitely in VLEO.

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  Japan's Hayabusa2 Achieves First-Ever Laser Ranging Experiment with an Asteroid

  By Matthew Williams - September 08, 2026

  On Sunday July 5th, 2026, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) achieved the first-ever successful laser ranging experiment while making a flyby of an asteroid.

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  Scientists Develop Test Setup For New Way To Survive Reentry

  By Andy Tomaswick - September 02, 2026

  Spacecraft famously have small bits of them disintegrate on reentry. That’s by design, as it is one of the easiest solutions to absorbing the incredible amounts of energy they experience. However, it also results in long turn around times while these heat shields are repaired, and the shields themselves act as “dead weight” limiting payload capacity. With the increased focus on reusable rockets, and the emphasis on payload capacity, engineers have been looking for alternative solutions to the reentry problem - and the one of the most promising is known as magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) braking. A new paper from researchers at the Tokyo Metropolitan University describes a new test setup that should help designers of these advanced braking systems truly capture what their system is doing upon reentry.

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  Martian Astronomy: Percy Sees a ‘Phobos Eclipse’ From Mars

  By David Dickinson - August 31, 2026

  Sure. It’s just another image of Phobos crossing the disk of the Sun, as seen from the surface of Mars. Like so much of the modern space era, these images, once amazing, are now almost routine. But there’s some real science behind tasking the Mars rovers to conduct a little ‘Martian astronomy.’

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  High-Orbit Laser Satellites Could Guide Future Lunar Travelers

  By Andy Tomaswick - August 31, 2026

  Cislunar space is already getting crowded. And with that crowding comes infrastructure complications. One is navigation - there is no Global Positioning System available when you're not on the globe. Finding a spacecraft’s exact orbital path relies on networking with the Deep Space Network (DSN), a set of telescopes originally developed in the 1950s to communicate with spacecraft far afield. DSN itself is already getting overwhelmed with managing all of the missions requesting its time, so getting a precise orbital location currently can take hours. But researchers at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory think they might have a solution for this - launching a fleet of three satellites to collectively create a deep-space navigational system known as the LIght High-Orbit Utility Signal Emitter - LightHOUSE.

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  Interstellar Travel V: Warp Drives, Wormholes, and Halo Drives

  By Matthew Williams - August 29, 2026

  In our fifth installment, we explore the most exotic proposals for interstellar travel, including the Alcubierre Warp Metric, wormhole travel, the Halo Drive, and other truly advanced concepts.

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  Spaceflight Leaves Heart Muscle Cell Strength Intact

  By Laurence Tognetti, MSc - August 29, 2026

  Since the dawn of human space exploration, astronauts, scientists, and engineers have examined the short- and long-term effects of microgravity (often mistakenly called zero-gravity) on the human body. This includes the distribution of fluids to the upper body (called “puffy face”), an increase in height from the spine slightly extending, how solar and cosmic radiation impacts humans at the genetic level, and skeletal and muscle loss. However, arguably all these aspects pale in comparison to how the microgravity from spaceflight impacts the heart, and specifically heart muscle cells.

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  Astronaut Microbes Might Survive at Moon's Pole, NASA Warns

  By Laurence Tognetti, MSc - August 28, 2026

  One of the primary objectives of space exploration that often gets overlooked is the intense effort that goes into ensuring Earth microbes don’t contaminate planetary objects, also called forward contamination. This is done to prevent contaminating any potential life that might be present could get killed off my Earth microbes and scientists don’t want to make false discoveries. While space radiation and extreme temperatures often kill off any pesky microbes that hitch a ride on spacecraft, there remains a longstanding knowledge gap regarding whether microbes could survive the lunar polar regions due to its deep craters and varying topography.