Category: Space Exploration

Water in space

Did you know that up to 80% of the water on the International Space Station is recycled? Astronauts living and working 400 km above our planet might prefer not to think about it, but the water they drink is recycled from their colleague’s sweat and exhaled breath – collected as condensation on the Space Station’s walls.

Jupiter’s unknown journey through the early solar system revealed

It is known that gas giants around other stars are often located very near their sun. According to accepted theory, these gas planets were formed far away and subsequently migrated to an orbit closer to the star. Now, researchers from Lund University and other institutions have used advanced computer simulations to learn more about Jupiter’s journey through our own solar system approximately 4.5 billion years ago. At that time, Jupiter was quite recently formed, as were the other planets in the solar system. The planets were gradually built up by cosmic dust, which circled around our young sun in a disk of gas and particles. Jupiter was no larger than our own planet.

Exploring Mercury in a new book

Up until 2008, only one spacecraft had ever visited the planet Mercury, and it didn’t linger long. NASA’s Mariner 10 mission flew past the tiny world three times in the 1970s, giving humanity a helpful but limited glimpse of the solar system’s innermost planet. Mariner 10 imaged about 45 percent of Mercury’s surface and discovered its internal magnetic field, among other things.