News by Subject Space & Planetary

Researchers are developing a predictive model to help NASA anticipate conflicts and communication breakdowns among crew members and head off problems that could make or break the Mission to Mars. Highlights: Space exploration analogs in US, Russia offer rare opportunity to study teams in isolation, confinement; Mars crew will likely experience decline in creative thinking, problem solving; predictive model may allow NASA to foresee, address team problems before they arise.

Queen Mary University of London has led a study which describes the first direct measurement of how energy is transferred from the chaotic electromagnetic fields in space to the particles that make up the solar wind, leading to the heating of interplanetary space.

The heaviest vehicle to successfully land on Mars is the Curiosity Rover at 1 metric ton, about 2,200 pounds. Sending more ambitious robotic missions to the surface of Mars, and eventually humans, will require landed payload masses in the 5- to 20-ton range. To do that, we need to figure out how to land more mass. That was the goal of a recent study.

A team of researchers repurposed navigational sensors aboard NASA's Curiosity rover, enabling the scientists to measure gravity on the lower slopes of Mount Sharp, a peak that rises from the center of Gale Crater. The results suggest that these rock layers are much less dense than predicted, calling into question a competing theory that Gale Crater was once completely filled with sediment then later excavated by erosion, leaving only Mount Sharp behind.

Scientists have charted the environment surrounding a stellar-mass black hole that is 10 times the mass of the Sun using NASA's Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) aboard the International Space Station.

On Jan. 4, 2019, at 4:37 a.m. EST the CAPER-2 mission launched from Norway. The rocket flew through active aurora borealis, or northern lights, to study the waves that accelerate electrons into our atmosphere.