IEEE Spectrum

A group of space tech aficionados wants to send humanity’s first mission to another star. The spacecraft, called the Fermi Explorer , could launch as soon as 2029—but would take 80,000 years to reach its destination. The mission would follow a trajectory designed by an AI model and would primarily serve as a message in the bottle for a possible alien civilization or future humans who might beat i…

On July 20, a satellite from the German company OroraTech detected a hot spot near Aberdeen, California, east of Kings Canyon National Park. It was the first detection of the Rock Fire , which prompted evacuations and road closures and grew to more than 12,000 acres in hot, windy conditions before it was contained by firefighters. The Rock Fire is one of a small but growing number of first detect…

In the 1960s NASA began developing a system of reusable space shuttles to make its work more efficient and to reduce costs. The shuttles could launch like rockets, maneuver in Earth’s orbit, and land like airplanes. They also could carry large satellites to and from orbit. Like other types of transportation, machinery eventually breaks down, and parts need to be replaced or fixed. And the cargo b…

The biggest threat to any crewed expedition to Mars is time . NASA’s shortest blueprint for sending people to the Red Planet and back requires spending 620 days in space and 30 days on Mars. Even setting aside the compounding challenges of building life-support systems that can operate without resupply for that long, or the fact that longer journeys leave more time for unlucky accidents, life in …

Gravitational wave astronomy has seen plenty of improvements since the original signal was captured in 2015 . Despite that, it remains an engineering challenge to actually create the detectors needed for the precise measurements required to spot gravitational waves. A new NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) grant is funding a concept from a team led by Paul Stankus at Brookhaven National Lab…

In 1962 Canada’s Alouette 1 , a 145 kg satellite designed to study the ionosphere, was launched on board NASA’s Thor-Agena launch vehicle. Its launch made Canada the third country in history to have a satellite in orbit. Canada’s presence in space remains strong to this day; Artemis II’s crew included Canadian Jeremy Hansen , and MDA Space ’s robotic Canadarm became iconic aboard the Space Shuttl…

A new kind of nuclear-based power production, now being tested in space for the first time, could pave the way for long-term electricity generation on the moon’s surface—and therefore, human habitation. These nuclear “batteries” could survive the long, bitterly cold lunar nights with ease. On July 7, a 1U CubeSat, just 10 centimeters (about 4 inches) on a side, was rocketed into space aboard Spac…

Rover data from more than 20 years ago has revealed clues to the existence of liquid water on ancient Mars. NASA’s Spirit rover carried a specialized instrument called a Mössbauer spectrometer that performed mineralogical analyses of soil, rock, and dust on the surface of the red planet at Gusev Crater . Individual measurements didn’t always indicate definitive proof of water, but when scientist …

Limited battery life can hinder how useful drones are in responding to disasters, inspecting infrastructure, or delivering items. Now researchers in China have designed a system that could transfer power to a drone midflight using lasers. They say it could significantly boost drone flight times. Many drones can stay aloft for less than an hour before they need to land to recharge or swap batterie…

India’s efforts to grow a globally competitive private space industry are beginning to pay off, with a successful orbital launch by startup Skyroot Aerospace on 18 July. The company’s Vikram-1 rocket blasted off from the Indian Space Research Organization’s (ISRO) Satish Dhawan Space Centre, Sriharikota, at 12:05 p.m. local time last Saturday and took roughly 15 minutes to reach an orbit of aroun…

The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is investigating the role U.S. military GPS jamming may have played in the fatal crash of a civilian medevac plane in New Mexico in May. The light aircraft slammed into the side of a mountain in the middle of the night while flying from Roswell to Ruidoso, N.M., to pick up a patient. The two pilots and two nurses on board died, and the impact s…

Earlier this month, Japan’s veteran Hayabusa2 sample return spacecraft performed a surprisingly rapid and close-up flyby of a near Earth asteroid. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) launched Hayabusa2 in 2014 to visit the asteroid Ryugu, arriving in June 2018, and returning samples back to Earth in December 2020. But after dropping off its precious cargo via reentry capsule, JAXA then …

In the 1970s, American Fireworks , a family-run pyrotechnics company in Hudson, Ohio, used a “home run box” to offer quick and easy fireworks displays for the Cleveland Indians (now the Cleveland Guardians) baseball games. The red wooden crate had metal silos to store the rockets. Each switch on the control panel allowed the operator to set off a different firing sequence. This setup instantly tr…

A new nanopatterned structure based on subwavelength physics has proved its value in a real-world setting, and it could qualify for use in outer space. The device, integrated with one of the world’s most advanced solar observatories, captured pictures of the Sun’s magnetic field in a new, advantageous way: via a single snapshot with no moving parts. The demonstration , published 10 June in Scienc…

There’s bad news to report on the clear skies front. A new paper, available as a preprint on arXiv from researchers at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California, reports that 73.3 percent of images the agency’s new SPHEREx space telescope collected between May and September of last year were contaminated by at least one artificial satellite trail. And it’s only going to get worse from here. Unfor…

The moon’s south pole is home to permanently shadowed craters, and now researchers are proposing that they could be home to incredibly stable lasers that could one day serve as a lunar time standard. Although currently only a proposal, such a time standard would synchronize activity on the moon and beyond, as well as enable GPS-like navigation for spacecraft in lunar orbit and rovers on the surfa…

The Very Large Array (VLA), the iconic field of radio antennas featured in the film Contact (inspired by Carl Sagan’s novel), has a long and distinguished history of service. But after more than 45 years of studying the radio sky and probing the mysteries of the universe, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), the part of the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) that operates the VLA,…

CubeSats have found success across government, industry, and academia as a cost-effective way to test new technologies in orbit. But the tiny satellites suffer from a communications bottleneck: Their small antennas limit both the transmission rate at which data can be sent to another satellite, or back to Earth. To tackle this problem, researchers at the Institute of Science Tokyo (Science Tokyo)…

Direct-to-cell technology uses LEO satellites as spaceborne cell towers. It delivers LTE services to existing smartphones without hardware changes, bridging global coverage gaps. What Attendees will Learn How DTC works as a spaceborne cell tower — LEO satellites carry LTE eNodeB payloads in regenerative mode. How they serve unmodified phones using quasi-earth-fixed multi-beam antennas. How the sa…

This sponsored article is brought to you by Master Bond . Outgassing is the release of volatile substances from a cured adhesive over time. These released materials, which may include residual solvents, unreacted monomers, or other chemical species, can deposit on nearby surfaces, causing contamination that interferes with sensitive components. What Is Outgassing and How Is It Measured? The indus…