Universe Today – News from space and astronomy

How can artificial intelligence (AI) support astronauts on long-term space missions? This emerges from a current study 2024 International Astronautical Congress in Milan, Italy, hopes to present improvements to the Mars Exploration Telemetry-Driven Information System (METIS) system with an international team of researchers led by the German Aerospace Center and discuss how these will help future astronauts on Mars could ease the communication problems between Earth and Mars, which could take up to 24 minutes depending on the orbit. This study has the potential to develop more efficient technologies for long-term space missions beyond Earth, particularly to the Moon and Mars.

Read on “Astronauts on long missions need personal AI assistants”

Are primordial black holes real? They could have arisen in the unusual physics that governed the universe shortly after the Big Bang. The idea dates back to the 1960s, but due to a lack of evidence it remains purely hypothetical.

If they exist, a new paper suggests they may be hiding in places so unlikely that no one would have ever thought to look.

Read on “Could primordial black holes hide in plain sight?”

One of NASA’s primary missions is to inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers to pursue STEM fields. This is done by producing inspiring and educational content on various platforms. But sometimes a more direct approach is needed by rewarding students for their contributions to solving a specific problem facing NASA. Recently, the organization announced one such challenge – the Power to Explore Challenge, which K-12 students can participate in through the end of January.

Read on “NASA needs students’ help planning missions to other moons”

Our satellites are dispassionate observers of climate change on Earth. From their vantage point, they watch as the pack ice slowly loses its grip on the polar seas, ice shelves break apart, and previously frozen parts of the planet turn green with vegetation.

Now scientists have compiled 35 years of satellite data that show Antarctica is slowly but noticeably becoming greener.

Read on “Antarctica has become ten times greener in 35 years”

In a few billion years our sun will die. It will initially reach the red giant stage, potentially swelling in size to Earth’s orbit. Its outer layers are ejected into space while its core evolves into a white dwarf. Life on Earth will disappear and our planet itself could be consumed by the sun. White dwarfs are the fate of all medium-sized stars, and considering the path of their demise, it is reasonable to assume that all planets die with their sun. But the fate of white dwarf planets may not be lifeless after all.

Read on “White dwarfs may have habitable planets, detected by JWST”

Now it’s time to capture Jupiter at its best.

The King of the Planets rules the winter night sky. Early December gives sky watchers a good reason to brave the cold as Jupiter shines at its best. Look for the royal planet rising in the east at sunset while the sun sets in the west.

Read on “Catch Jupiter next weekend at Opposition 2024”

NASA has awarded SpaceX a contract to launch the Dragonfly mission to Saturn’s moon Titan. A Falcon Heavy will send the rotorcraft and its lander to Titan in 2028 if all goes according to plan, and the mission will arrive on Titan in 2034. Dragonfly is an astrobiology mission aimed at measuring the presence of various chemicals on Titan’s icy moon.

Dragonfly will be the second spacecraft to visit Titan, joining the Huygens probe and its brief visit in 2005.

Read on “Dragonfly flies to Titan with a Falcon Heavy”

Even some areas that appear to be completely established will occasionally produce groundbreaking ideas that impact the rest of the fields of science and technology. Mechanics is one of those relatively established fields – it is understood primarily at the macroscopic level and relatively few new breakthroughs have been made in it recently. Until a few years ago, a group of Harvard engineers developed a so-called totimorphic structure, and a recent paper by researchers from ESA’s Advanced Concepts Team examines in detail how it could be used to create megastructures such as telescope mirrors and human habitats in space .

Read on “A new reconfigurable structure could be used to create habitats in space”

In our search for exoplanets, we found that many of them fall into specific types or categories, such as hot Jupiters, super-Earths, and ice giants. While we don’t have examples of the first two in our solar system, we do have two ice giants: Uranus and Neptune. They are medium-sized gas planets that formed in the cold outer regions of the solar system. For this reason, they are rich in water and other volatile compounds and are very different from large gas giants like Jupiter. We still have a lot to learn about these worlds, but what we’ve discovered so far has been surprising, such as the nature of their magnetic fields.

Read on “What’s in Uranus and Neptune? A new way to find out”

You know how it is. You’re getting a new telescope and you need to know where to point it! The larger the telescope, the more potential targets and the more difficult the decision! To date, we have found over 5,000 confirmed exoplanets (5,288 to be exact) with thousands more candidates. As missions like Gaia identify thousands of nearby stars like our sun that could harbor Earth-like planets, it’s time to hunt them down. A new paper takes on the huge task of filtering out all the millions of candidates into about 1,000 main sequence stars, or binaries, that are worth exploring. From this they identified the 100 most promising targets and from them the 10 best planetary systems.

Read on “Did you just build a giant, next-generation planet-hunting space telescope? Here you can find out where you can point it out.”