Due to its unique orbital characteristics, the retrograde geosynchronous orbit (RGSO) has demonstrated substantial potential in the fields of space surveillance and space situational awareness. However, constrained by the direction of Earth's rotation and the tracking, telemetry, and control capabilities of launch sites, the direct launch of satellites into RGSO from Earth must overcome an additional velocity increment of more than approximately 4 km/s, entailing enormous fuel consumption and significant engineering difficulty. Conventional approaches employ lunar gravity assists to transfer from low Earth orbit or geosynchronous transfer orbit to RGSO, yet the velocity increment requirements remain relatively high and the transfer paths are limited. With the increasing development of cislunar space in recent years, an increasing number of spacecraft on cislunar orbits are being launched and deployed. If a spacecraft is placed on standby in cislunar orbits, whether the sensitive dynamical characteristics of the three-body problem in cislunar space can be exploited to achieve low-energy transfer to RGSO has become a key issue for expanding the utilization value of cislunar space assets.

An NJIT-led undergraduate team brought a new idea to NASA — power life-support systems on a lunar base with a swarm of solar-harvesting robots from space.

NASA’s Perseverance rover reveals groundwater, lake water and hydrothermal activity preserved in rocks along Jezero Crater’s Margin Unit in Purdue-led study

Apophis will make an extremely close flyby of Earth on April 13, 2029, at a distance of approximately 31,029 km—an event unprecedented for an asteroid of this size—providing a valuable natural experiment for studying tidal interactions, spin-state variations, and surface material migration between the asteroid and Earth. A large number of ground-based observations and space missions are expected to participate, but most observations will be concentrated from Earth's perspective, leaving observational blind spots as Apophis rapidly recedes from Earth's view after the flyby. LUMIO (Lunar Meteoroid Impacts Observer) is a 12U CubeSat of the European Space Agency, planned to be deployed in a quasi-halo orbit around the Earth–Moon L2 point; its primary mission is to observe meteoroid impact flashes on the lunar farside, with a launch expected in 2028. However, three critical questions remain unanswered: whether LUMIO-Cam—a camera designed for observing impact flashes—can detect Apophis as a sub-pixel target, whether it can resolve fluctuations in its light curve, and whether it can observe for a sufficiently long duration to obtain complete spin-period information.

With the widespread application of space traveling wave tube amplifiers (TWTAs) as core final-stage amplification devices in satellite communication systems, their operational reliability directly affects satellite signal transmission capability, and any failure may even lead to service interruption. Currently, fault statistics for space TWTAs are recorded in text form, encompassing a large number of fault phenomena, causes, and corresponding solutions. However, as the volume of fault events continues to grow, traditional analysis methods relying on manual statistics and empirical judgment suffer from low efficiency and lack of knowledge reasoning capabilities, making it difficult to comprehensively analyze multi-dimensional fault information. Although artificial intelligence technologies, particularly knowledge graphs (KGs) and large language models (LLMs), have demonstrated substantial potential in fault diagnosis, research on effectively integrating these two approaches and applying them to the specific fault diagnosis of space TWTAs remains unexplored. Therefore, how to construct an intelligent diagnosis framework capable of automatically understanding natural language fault descriptions and performing knowledge reasoning has become a key challenge in improving the troubleshooting efficiency and decision support capabilities for space TWTAs.

A new University of Utah-led survey with the Hubble Space Telescope is shedding light on the stellar astrophysics operating in early galaxies. The Treasury of Extremely Metal-Poor O Stars survey uses UV observations from Hubble’s Cosmic Origins Spectrograph to study massive stars in nearby galaxies that are the best available analogs of stars in the early universe. The unprecedently large dataset from TEMPOS could help astronomers build better models of massive stars to understand how they shaped galaxies when the universe was young. Such models are essential to interpret observations of early galaxies now coming from the James Webb Space Telescope.