Mechanical engineering assistant professor Erik Komendera developed a method that combines vibrations and AI to determine how deeply a rock is buried, helping robots clear terrain more efficiently.

Mars may be more volcanically active than we thought, according to new research. The Trace Gas Orbiter detected HCl, a chemical associated with magma, at a time of year that's difficult except by volcanic origins. The new research also identified new surface fissures on Mars that could be the […]

Researchers at Washington University examined how dust interacts with the spacesuit swatches on the Perseverance Rover. Future missions to Mars require that planners account for the effects of dust exposure on humans and materials.

Thousands of so-called zombie satellites orbit Earth in the critical Low-Earth Orbit regime. They're either inactive or have stopped alerting other satellites to their presence. Researchers are building a system called CORTEX that can guide a repair satellite to autonomously dock with these zombies.

In propulsion system design, engineers have long faced a trade-off between solid and liquid rocket fuels. Each has advantages and disadvantages, and in an effort to try to min/max the efficacy of different types of fuel, researchers have long placed an emphasis on a hybrid between solids and […]

Millisecond pulsars are fascinating objects that serve as natural clocks in the Universe. They form by drawing material and angular momentum from a companion. This mass transfer can rapidly accelerate the companion's evolution to a white dwarf. Astronomers have detected a millisecond pulsar's white […]

A new study of more than three dozen dwarf galaxies has surprised researchers with just how little oxygen they have been able to retain over cosmic time. The results reveal that we still have major gaps in our understanding of galaxy evolution.

The decades old idea that our solar system’s Oort Cloud is continually perturbed by a heretofore undetected low mass Red Dwarf star remains the best explanation for periodicities found in Earth’s impact record. Or so says a well known physicist who has long championed this idea.

Ultra-Diffuse Galaxies are strange because they're as large as the Milky Way, but have far fewer stars. It's as if they're puffed up for some reason. Determining what's going on with them could help confirm the Lambda-CDM model. A new proposed instrument for the Extremely Large Telescope could give […]

NASA's ESCAPADE mission features a pair of identical spacecraft on their way to Mars. They launched outside of the normal launch window, so they'll perform powered slingshot maneuvers to boost their speed. Once there, they'll "fly" in formation and study how the solar wind interacts with what […]