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Occupy Mars? Or the moon? Get a reality check on Elon Musk’s plans

It’s an age-old debate in space circles: Should humanity’s first city on another world be built on the moon, or on Mars? As recently as last year, SpaceX founder Elon Musk saw missions to the moon as a “distraction.” In a post to his X social-media platform, he declared that “we’re going straight to Mars.” […]

Cosmic curveball: Distant system challenges planet-formation theory

An international team of astronomers has discovered a distant planetary system that challenges long-standing theories of how planets form. Across our galaxy, astronomers routinely observe a characteristic pattern in planetary systems: rocky planets orbiting close to their host star with gas giants farther away. Our own solar system follows this rule, with the inner planets: […]

NASA moon rocket hit by new problem, putting March launch with astronauts in jeopardy

NASA’s new moon rocket suffered another setback Saturday, putting next month’s planned launch with astronauts in jeopardy.

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Cosmologists collaborate to sharpen measurements of the Hubble constant

Drawing together leading experts from across the field, an international collaboration of cosmologists has created a unified approach for measuring the value of the Hubble constant. Published in Astronomy & Astrophysics, the milestone could bring us a step closer to understanding why the universe appears to be expanding faster than our standard cosmological model predicts. […]

A low-cost microscope to study living cells in zero gravity

As space agencies prepare for human missions to the moon and Mars, scientists need to understand how the absence of gravity affects living cells. Now, a team of researchers has built a rugged, affordable microscope that can image cells in real time during the chaotic conditions of zero-gravity flight—and they’re making the design available to […]

Supercomputer simulations reveal rotation drives chemical mixing in red giant stars

Advances in supercomputing have made solving a long‐standing astronomical conundrum possible: How can we explain the changes in the chemical composition at the surface of red giant stars as they evolve?

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SpaceX rocket left behind a plume of chemical pollution as it burnt up in the atmosphere

Space junk returning to Earth is introducing metal pollution to the pristine upper atmosphere as it burns up on re-entry, a new study has found.

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Citizen science: Map the Earth’s magnetic shield with the Space Umbrella Project

A stream of charged particles known as the solar wind flows from the sun toward Earth. Here, it meets Earth’s magnetic fields, which shield our planet like a giant umbrella. The Space Umbrella project needs your help investigating this dynamic region, where NASA’s Magnetosphere Multiscale (MMS) mission has been collecting data since 2015. The MMS […]

3D method can accurately measure gravity in wide binary stars, as demonstrated by pilot study

Since the third Gaia data release in 2022, wide binary stars with separation greater than several thousand astronomical units have been intensely investigated across the world, to probe the nature of gravity in the low acceleration regime, weaker than about 1 nanometer per second squared.

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REGALADE: The most extensive catalog of galaxies for modern astronomy

An international team of scientists led by the Institute of Cosmos Sciences at the University of Barcelona (ICCUB) and the Institute of Space Studies of Catalonia (IEEC) has presented REGALADE, an unprecedented catalog covering the entire sky and bringing together nearly 80 million galaxies. The work, published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, marks a […]

Impact-formed glass provides evidence of cosmic collision in Brazil about 6 million years ago

For the first time in Brazil, researchers have identified a field of tektites. These are natural glasses formed by the high-energy impact of extraterrestrial bodies against Earth’s surface. These structures, named geraisites in honor of the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, where they were first discovered, constitute a new strewn field. This expands the incomplete […]

Small but mighty microplate reader could transform NASA research

A small but mighty piece of lab equipment, about the size of a cellphone, has arrived at the International Space Station after launching with NASA’s SpaceX Crew-12 mission. NASA aims to use the off-the-shelf device, called a microplate reader, to conduct vital biological research in space and get real-time access to data.

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NASA targets March for first moon mission by Artemis astronauts after fueling test success

NASA aims to send astronauts to the moon in March after acing the latest rocket fueling test.

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Flexible force fields can protect our return to the moon

Lunar dust remains one of the biggest challenges for a long-term human presence on the moon. Its jagged, clingy nature makes it naturally stick to everything from solar panels to the inside of human lungs. And while we have some methods of dealing with it, there is still plenty of experimentation to do here on […]

Atom-thin electronics withstand space radiation, potentially surviving for centuries in orbit

Atom-thick layers of molybdenum disulfide are ideally suited for radiation-resistant spacecraft electronics, researchers in China have confirmed. In a study published in Nature, Peng Zhou and colleagues at Fudan University put a communications system composed of the material through a gauntlet of rigorous tests—including the transmission of their university’s Anthem—confirming that its performance is barely […]