Tag Archives: space

Researchers in Japan have finished building the world’s first wooden satellite. Called LignoSat—a reference to lignin, wood’s chief organic polymer—the satellite represents a potential solution to the space industry’s growing debris problem.Space junk is such a pervasive problem that it’s becoming more space junk and tricking people into believing they’ve …

Artist’s rendering of a Solsys system that mechanically sorts regolith before dissolving nutrients into water. (Image: Solsys/ESA)The European Space Agency (ESA) announced Wednesday that it’s launched a new project that will help determine the feasibility of farming on the moon. The project, “Enabling Lunar In-Situ Agriculture by Producing Fertilizer from …

Not long ago, an enormous telescope hovering beyond the moon and peering back to the dawn of the universe would have been science fiction, but the James Webb Space Telescope is out there today doing very real science. The next big advancement in space science has to start somewhere, and …

The James Webb Space Telescope was not designed exclusively to hunt for exoplanets like NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), but it can still make vital contributions to our understanding of these distant worlds. NASA has announced that Webb just confirmed its first exoplanet, a world known as LHS 475 …

Digital imaging technology has advanced by leaps and bounds in the last few decades. You can buy a smartphone that fits in your pocket with a whopping 200MP of camera resolution, but sometimes you just have to go big. Engineers at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California are putting …

NASA has been using the same spaceflight computers for almost 30 years, but it won’t be much longer. The agency has awarded a $50 million contract to Arizona-based Microchip Technology Inc. to “architect, design, and deliver” a next-generation space-optimized processor. NASA expects the new chip, which will be used in …

Supersonic travel hasn’t been a reality for even the most well-off individuals since the Concorde was retired almost 20 years ago, but a company called Venus Aerospace wants to make super-fast passenger planes a reality again. Its proposed Stargazer aircraft will blow right past supersonic into the realm of hypersonic …

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is on the verge of beginning its science operations, so the recent news that it has suffered a micrometeoroid impact is concerning. The space observatory is the long-awaited successor to Hubble, and it could serve as our window to the wider universe for the …

Until a few decades ago, no human being had ever been away from gravity’s loving embrace. As the era of space exploration dawns, it’s still unclear how long stretches without gravity will affect the body. A new analysis of astronauts from Oregon Health & Science University shows that their brains …

  Hello and welcome to This Week in Space, our weekly roundup of all the space news that’s fit to print — or at least, distract you from doomscrolling. First off, May the Fourth be with you: this week we marked Star Wars Day, a nerd-culture staple. Any reason to …