A company from the UK called Spacebit has announced that it will put a rover on the moon in 2021. The mission will mark the first UK mission to the lunar surface. The rover the team is sending is very different from rovers typically sent to the moon and other planets.
In the 1970s, the NASA Ames Research Center commissioned artwork envisioning what life in space may look like. The results were retrofuturistic paintings that feature huge living quarters and agricultural centers in space, entire cities in space stations, artificial sunlight and rivers, and more.
Here at the tail end of the year 2020, Nintendo aimed to celebrate a KIBO stream from the International Space Station. In the mix on this particular event celebration was a new Pikachu delivered via Mystery Gift in Pokemon Sword and Pokemon Shield. If you have either one of these games, this unique, rare, limited edition - whatever you want to call it - Pikachu is yours to claim.
A new National Strategy for Planetary Protection has been released by the White House, detailing some of the challenges that need to be addressed to avoid contamination of Earth from other planets, and vice-versa. The document, handiwork of a team assembled by the National Space Council and Office of Science and Technology Policy, sets out some of the questions to be answered and policies to be created in order to avoid future missions to Mars and further afield from inadvertently resulting in terrestrial contamination.
One way SpaceX works to make placing satellites and other objects into orbit cheaper is by landing and reusing its Falcon 9 booster rockets. It has a long history of successfully landing the first stage boosters, both on land and on drone ships in the ocean. SpaceX is now outlining its plan to capture and reuse the Falcon Super Heavy booster that will be used to push Starship and larger payloads into space.
NASA has confirmed the approval of two heliophysics missions to explore the Sun and the system driving space weather near Earth. The mission includes the Extreme Ultraviolent High-Throughput Spectroscopic Telescope Epsilon Mission, or EUVST. The other mission is the Electrojet Zeeman Imaging Explorer or EZIE. The goal of the missions are to help scientists better understanding the Sun and Earth as interconnected systems.
Researchers from the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe have been conducting a study of black holes that could've formed in the early universe. These so-called primordial black holes are believed to have formed before stars and galaxies were born. Primordial black holes could account for all or part of dark matter and be responsible for some of the observed gravitational wave signals and supermassive black holes found in the center of our galaxy and others.
A new supercluster of galaxy clusters has been identified, potentially helping explain the fundaments of galactic development, and validating the eFEDS project's ability to give groundbreaking new insight into some of the largest known structures in the universe. Expanding as our universe spreads, superclusters are several orders of magnitude above our Milky Way, and can potentially span billions of light-years.
Astronomers have used the National Science Foundation's Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) to view previously unseen details in a jet of material being ejected from the core of the galaxy about 12.8 billion light-years from Earth. The material is being ejected from the center of the galaxy at three-quarters of the speed of light. The galaxy in question is called PSO J0309+27 and is known as a blazer.
The number of satellites being put into orbit is always increasing, and many researchers and scientists worldwide fear the amount of space junk that will accumulate in orbit around the Earth. A Japanese company called Sumitomo Forestry is working with researchers from Kyoto University to develop the first satellites made of wood by 2023. Sumitomo Forestry says that it has started research on tree growth and the use of wood materials in space.
A joint ESA and NASA probe is on its way to the sun. The probe is called the Solar Orbiter, and on its trek towards the sun, it passed by Venus. Solar Orbiter completed its first flyby Venus about 7:39 AM Eastern time on Sunday, December 27.
Researchers have been conducting a study on a mysterious meteorite that exploded over Sudan in 2008. The meteor was estimated by NASA to weigh about nine tons and to be nearly 13-foot in diameter when it was spotted before impact. After the meteorite entered the atmosphere and impacted the planet's surface, researchers went to the Sudanese desert to collect its remains for study. One of those fragments suggests that the meteor likely broke off from a massive asteroid approximately the size of the dwarf planet Ceres.