The aging Hubble Space Telescope has had a rough year, with two major instances of the telescope being unable to conduct science operations. NASA confirmed this week that Hubble has returned to full science operations with all four active instruments collecting science data. The orbiting observatory went into safe mode when instruments recorded synchronization message issues.
Putting satellites, cargo, and astronauts into space is an expensive proposition. As a result, all the private companies working with NASA are attempting to reuse some of the rocket hardware to help reduce the cost of launches. SpaceX is the best-known company in the private space industry, with its Falcon 9 rockets being routinely reused. While SpaceX may be the best known, it's certainly not the only private company working to put satellites and other cargo into orbit as efficiently and cheaply as possible.
One of the critical tasks that NASA handles for the entire world is tracking as many near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) as possible. So far, almost 28,000 NEAs have been discovered utilizing telescopes that scan the night sky. Those telescopes add about 3000 new near-Earth asteroids each year, but there are still more to discover.
Nissan has announced that it and the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) are working together to develop a new rover prototype that could one day explore the moon's surface. Nissan has worked with JAXA on improving driving controllability since January 2020. Lunar rovers are faced with significant challenges when tasked with exploring the surface of the moon.
Artificial intelligence, or AI, is one of the most prolific areas of research in several fields. AI has vast potential to improve medicine and many other fields of research. Typically, an AI lives inside a computer system constrained inside the digital realm. However, a company called Engineered Arts has developed what it calls an AB, or artificial body, that will give an AI a physical place to reside.
The International Space Station (ISS) is aging and has been developing issues that could one day make it uninhabitable over the last several years. After spending decades in orbit, NASA looks to a future where other space stations will also orbit the Earth. Rather than being developed by NASA and partner nations, these future space stations will be commercial projects. NASA has awarded a contract to Northrop Grumman to develop a cost-effective commercial free-flying space station in low Earth orbit (LEO).
While the International Space Station is the destination for conducting research in low-Earth orbit, it will not be that way forever. The United States and NASA, along with partners worldwide who are already helping to maintain the ISS, will continue to fund the space station for a few more years, but eventually, it will have to be replaced. NASA has now named three companies selected to submit designs for new space stations, and there are some familiar names on the list.
NASA's TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) performs the job of discovering distant planets orbiting other stars extremely well. It has discovered thousands of potential exoplanet candidates, and a number of those have been confirmed to be planets orbiting distant stars. In its latest discovery, TESS has found an exoplanet the size of Mars but similar to the composition of Mercury.
You've probably heard of black holes existing in the universe and may even have studied the phenomena in a high school science class. According to NASA, scientists speculate that they can range in size from a mere atom to supermassive ones the size of a million suns combined.
While countless artists have used their imaginations to depict these mysterious objects, you might be surprised to find out that, in spite of the size of some of them, they cannot be seen with either the naked eye or with the most powerful telescopes. How can something potentially so massive hide so well? To understand this, we must learn about what black holes are and how they are formed.
Before humankind was able to explore the sky outside of Earth's orbit, we first had to get an understanding of what happens to our bodies once we ascend past a certain elevation. Fly too high in the sky and the human body will succumb to a lack of oxygen. And if you survive that, the colder atmosphere will surely lead to hypothermia. Believe it or not, it took the perseverance of one determined Spaniard to figure out how to work around those issues, allowing for exploring the skies at great heights.
The history of the United States space program was molded in part by the many women who have not only been launched into orbit aboard spacecraft, but who have also worked tirelessly behind the scenes in making the rocket and shuttle launches mathematically possible. From the more than 50 women launched into space, to the engineers that started the process on paper, women have been an integral part of NASA from the beginning (via History of NASA).
Engineers at Stanford University have been working on a robot that is part quadrotor flying drone and part peregrine falcon. The upper half of the robot looks like a common quadrotor drone designed to fly through the air. The lower half of the drone has a pair of clawed feet - significantly different from anything we've seen in the past.