Artificial lights are blotting out the moon and stars, harming human health, and disrupting the natural world. Why is this a problem? And how can we stop it without sitting in the dark?
Category: space – Page 9
Wristwatch-like device enables assessment of health risks for astronauts on mission to the moon
Just a few hours before the Orion spacecraft crossed the sky en route to the moon on April 1, mechatronics engineer Rodrigo Trevisan Okamoto received confirmation he had been waiting for since the Artemis 2 mission was announced in 2023. The email from NASA stated that the crew of the first crewed mission to orbit the moon in half a century would carry a device developed by Okamoto and his team at Condor Instruments, a São Paulo-based startup.
“The NASA announcement was sudden and caught us by surprise. And it was only after the mission concluded that we learned the astronauts had been using the equipment in tests for the past two years,” Okamoto told Agência FAPESP.
The device, called an actigraph, is shaped like a wristwatch and incorporates accelerometers, as well as light and temperature sensors, to precisely map the user’s sleep and wake patterns over the course of days or weeks.
We Found Galaxies Too Old for the Universe
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The James Webb Space Telescope found galaxies that are too ancient-looking for our young universe. You may have heard that, but it keeps finding them, and our recent efforts to solve this conundrum point in wildly different directions. Have we found galaxies older than the universe, or did we just learn something incredible about how galaxies form?
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Lunar Outpost has big plans for the moon. The new Pegasus lunar rover is just the start
Lunar Outpost aims to develop a whole ecosystem of infrastructure on the moon, as well as the robots that will build it.
“We’re a lunar infrastructure company, and the infrastructure of the moon base won’t be built by astronauts alone,” the company’s Vice President of Strategy Michael Moreno told Space.com. “It’ll be an autonomous robotic workforce, and that’s our expertise.”
Space.com spoke with Moreno in April 2026 at the Space Foundation’s annual Space Symposium in Colorado Springs about Lunar Outpost’s vision for autonomous technologies that will operate alongside astronauts to build the infrastructure needed for a sustained human presence on the moon.
Astronomers discover a super-Earth orbiting a nearby red dwarf
Astronomers from Italy and Brazil have investigated a nearby red dwarf star known as Ross 318 and have discovered an exoplanet orbiting this star, which is at least six times more massive than Earth. The discovery is reported in a research paper published May 11 on the arXiv preprint server.
Located just 28 light years away from Earth, Ross 318 (also known as Gliese 48, or TIC 379084450) is a red dwarf star of spectral type M3.5V. The star has an orbital period of approximately 51.5 days and an effective temperature of 3,450 K, and showcases strong magnetic activity, which poses a major challenge for exoplanet searches.
A team of astronomers led by Giuseppe Conzo from the amateur astronomy association Gruppo Astrofili Palidoro (GAP) decided to investigate Ross 318, hoping that amidst its magnetic activity, they could verify whether an alien world orbits this star. For this purpose, they conducted a systematic re-analysis of radial velocity (RV) data from the CARMENES spectrograph and decade-long High Resolution Echelle Spectrometer (HIRES) observations. Their study was complemented by data from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).
Orbital Data Centers: Power and Thermal Management for Scalable Architectures
Redwire’s latest whitepaper examines the challenges and opportunities associated with scaling orbital data centers (ODCs), with a focus on power generation and thermal management. ODCs could eventually surpass terrestrial data centers by leveraging abundant solar energy in space and avoiding Earth-based infrastructure limitations.
The whitepaper examines the scaling of power and thermal systems for ODCs within a single-spacecraft architecture and highlights how the future success of ODCs will depend on treating power and thermal management as primary architectural drivers from the earliest stages of design.
Drawing on decades of Redwire’s spaceflight heritage in deployable structures, high-power solar arrays, and thermal management systems, the in-depth study also highlights how existing flight-proven technologies can support practical and scalable orbital compute architectures.
This tiny outer Solar System world has an atmosphere. It shouldn’t
Astronomers have spotted something surprising in the far outer Solar System—a faint, short-lived atmosphere clinging to a tiny icy world that shouldn’t be able to hold one at all. The object, called 2002XV93, is far smaller than Pluto, yet observations during a rare stellar alignment revealed its presence through a subtle dimming of starlight. Even more puzzling, calculations suggest this atmosphere should vanish within about 1,000 years unless it’s constantly being replenished.
A group of professional and amateur astronomers in Japan has uncovered evidence that a small, distant object in the outer Solar System is surrounded by a thin atmosphere. The finding is surprising because the object is far too small to hold onto gas for long, raising new questions about how and when this atmosphere formed. Future observations will be needed to better understand its composition and origin.
Far beyond Neptune’s orbit, thousands of icy bodies known as trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) circle the Sun. Pluto is the most well-known example and is one of the few with a confirmed thin atmosphere. For most TNOs, however, the combination of extremely low temperatures and weak gravity makes it unlikely for them to retain any gases. As a result, scientists generally expect these distant objects to be airless.