Prof. Richard Binzel speaks with Living Lab Radio about NASA’s New Horizons mission, which captured pictures of the most distant object ever explored by a spacecraft. “We have an incredibly healthy spacecraft,” says Binzel. “We’ve shown incredible capability of these instruments, and with a little bit of luck we'll find another object that's up on the path ahead and we'll just keep exploring.”
TechCrunch reporter Devin Coldewey highlights how MIT researchers have found that tiny satellites, called CubeSats, equipped with lasers could help keep telescopes on track while they are gathering information in space. The light emitted from the lasers could allow satellites “to calculate their position and the minute changes to their imaging apparatus caused by heat and radiation.”
Prof. Maria Zuber, MIT’s vice president for research, speaks with The Washington Post about the significance of China successfully landing a spacecraft, called Chang’e 4, on the far side of the moon. “Certainly there will be some great new science,” Zuber said. “But I would say the landing of Chang’e 4 is a teaser for what comes next.”
Cristina Quinn writes for WGBH about the MIT Instrumentation Lab, which was “tasked with creating code the astronauts would use to navigate the moon without the help of ground control in Houston” for NASA’s 1968 Apollo 8 mission. “The Apollo Guidance Computer was a milestone in computing technology in many ways,” explains Debbie Douglas, director of collections at the MIT Museum.
NASA’s Voyager 2 probe has entered interstellar space, reports CBS News. "Working on Voyager makes me feel like an explorer, because everything we're seeing is new," says John Richardson, principal investigator for the plasma science experiment onboard the spacecraft.
CBS Boston’s Liam Martin joined students from the MIT Rocket Team as they celebrated NASA successfully landing a probe on Mars. “Just thinking that this is one step closer to humanity being able to live on Mars, it’s really exciting,” says undergraduate Dayna Erdmann.
Boston Herald reporter Jordan Graham writes that MIT researchers have developed an autonomous system that allows fleets of drones to navigate without GPS and could be used to help find missing hikers. “What we’re trying to do is automate the search part of the search-and-rescue problem with a fleet of drones,” explains graduate student Yulun Tian.
Two months after its launch, the TESS satellite has already identified two new exoplanet candidates, reports Mary Beth Griggs for Popular Science. “The team is excited about what TESS might discover next,” explains Prof. Sara Seager, who is serving as the deputy science director for the mission.
New Scientist reporter Will Gater writes that the TESS satellite has found its first two exoplanets. “This is one of the first objects we looked at,” says MIT postdoctoral fellow Chelsea Huang of the discovery of an exoplanet about 60 light years away. “We were immediately saying ‘hey this is too good to be true!’”
New York Times reporter Dennis Overbye writes about how the TESS satellite has already identified at least 73 stars that might have exoplanets. “TESS is doing great,” says George Ricker, a senior research scientist at MIT who is leading the TESS mission. Ricker adds that the satellite is, “all that we could have wished for!”
The TESS satellite has identified two new exoplanets, reports Joey Roulette for Reuters. “We will have to wait and see what else TESS discovers,” says Prof. Sara Seager, who is serving as the TESS deputy science director. “We do know that planets are out there, littering the night sky, just waiting to be found.”
The first image captured during the initial orbit of the MIT-developed TESS satellite shows thousands of stars in the Southern Sky, reports Brooks Hays for UPI. “Galaxies, globular clusters and thousands of stars can be found within the portrait of the Southern Sky. Hidden in the image are exoplanets,” writes Hays.
The MIT-developed TESS satellite has sent back its first batch of images of the southern sky from its quest to identify nearby exoplanets, reports writes Chris Ciacci for Fox News. Ciacci notes that the resulting images are “nothing short of incredible.”
Axios reporter Andrew Freeman writes that the TESS satellite has captured its first images of the southern sky. “This swath of the sky’s southern hemisphere includes more than a dozen stars we know have transiting planets based on previous studies from ground observatories,” explains MIT’s George Ricker, TESS’ principal investigator.
MIT researchers have discovered hundreds of galaxies that were hidden by light being emitted from a supermassive black hole, reports Kasandra Brabaw for Space.com. “The black hole, a type known as a quasar, sits 2.4 billion light-years from Earth and is so bright that astronomers have assumed it was alone in its area of space for decades,” Brabaw explains.