Astronomy & Space

A multinational team of scientists, including Andrew Steele from Carnegie and Philippe Schmitt-Kopplin of the Technical University of Munich and Helmholtz Munich, discovered that the Martian meteorite Tissint has a large diversity of organic molecules. Science Advances has published their research. There are only five Martian meteorites that have been seen as they plummeted to Earth, and Tissint, which crashed and landed in Morocco more than 11 years ago, is one of them. About 30 miles away from the town it is named for, pieces of it were discovered dispersed throughout the desert. This piece of Martian rock was propelled

Significant findings from research conducted by Curtin University on the age and endurance of an ancient asteroid composed of stony debris and dust could help save the world if one ever hurtles near it. The Japanese Space Agency's Hayabusa 1 mission brought back three minuscule dust fragments from the surface of the old, 500-meter-long rubble pile asteroid Itokawa for analysis. The findings of the study revealed that the asteroid Itokawa, which is 2 million kilometers from Earth and is around the size of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, is difficult to destroy and resistant to collision. Lead author Professor Fred Jourdan,

Mars is a dusty planet. For scientific missions, dust poses a persistent problem, from microscopic dust devils to enormous storms that cover the entire planet. This was particularly true for Ingenuity, the rotorcraft that has been exploring Mars with the Perseverance rover since February 2021. Future extraterrestrial rotorcraft missions can now move forward thanks to the work of scientists at Stevens Institute of Technology, the Space Science Institute, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory who have finished the first real-world study of Martian dust dynamics based on Ingenuity's historic first flights on the Red Planet. The work, reported in the December

Space weather, including solar flares, can cause havoc with communications, other kinds of satellites orbiting the Earth, and space travel. However, scientists' capacity to investigate solutions to that problem has been severely constrained up to this point. This is due to the fact that gravity affects laboratory studies conducted on Earth in ways that are very different from conditions in space. But a new study by UCLA physicists could, at last, help conquer that issue which could be a big step toward safeguarding humans (and equipment) during space expeditions, and to ensuring the proper functioning of satellites. The paper is

According to recently published research from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) of the U.S. Department of Energy, an ultrathin protective layer shows to be sufficient to shield a perovskite solar cell from the damaging impacts of space and harden it against environmental variables on Earth. Funded by the U.S. Department of Defense's Operational Energy Capability Improvement Fund (OECIF), the NREL research was done for the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) to develop low-cost innovative energy sources for powering the armed forces worldwide. The study is the most recent attempt to assess perovskites' suitability for usage in space applications, where they

A new examination of the Winchcombe shooting star has uncovered exactly how rapidly space rocks that tumble to Earth can be degraded by our air. The shooting star, which arrived in Gloucestershire in February last year, was quick to be recovered on UK soil for the first time in almost 30 years. Parts were recovered from a homegrown carport hours after it entered the world's air. Six days later, more pieces were found in a sheep field. The outcomes show that in spite of the fast recuperation of the shooting stars, the parts immediately fostered a few "earthly stages"—salts and

Among the various revelations made by the Interest explorer, undulating rock surfaces suggest lakes existed in an area of old Mars that researchers expected to be drier. At the point when NASA's Interest meanderer showed up at the "sulfate-bearing unit" the previous fall, researchers thought they'd seen the last proof that lakes once covered this area of Mars. That is on the grounds that the stone layers here were shaped in drier settings than areas investigated before in the mission. Sulfates, which are pungent minerals, are said to have been left behind when a stream dried up. "This is the