EurekAlert! News by Subject: Space & Planetary - News by Subject: Space & Planetary

Space & Planetary

Updates every hour. Last Updated: 10-Sep-2025 04:11 ET (10-Sep-2025 08:11 GMT/UTC)

What is the future direction of next-generation autonomous additive manufacturing systems?

International Journal of Extreme Manufacturing
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Researchers from California State University Northridge (CSUN), National University of Singapore (NUS), NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison) have introduced a new concept called autonomous additive manufacturing (AAM), where AI agents take over tasks traditionally managed by human operators. This breakthrough represents a major step toward creating autonomous manufacturing systems, offering improvements in knowledge representation and multi-modal capabilities in additive manufacturing (AM) processes.

The lead Ph.D. candidate, Mr. Haolin Fan, explained: "In the era of generative AI, this research points out a future where human expertise and AI collaborate seamlessly, leading to more resilient and adaptable manufacturing systems that could transform industrial production."

Journal: International Journal of Extreme Manufacturing

Studying cardiac cells in space to repair heart damage on Earth

International Space Station U.S. National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Heart disease remains the leading cause of death in the United States, accounting for one in five deaths. The inability of damaged heart muscle tissue to regenerate makes heart disease difficult to treat, and end-stage heart failure patients have no choice but to join a long list of people waiting for a heart transplant. Researchers from Emory University are working to provide another option for such patients. To do this, the team took their research to a laboratory unlike any on Earth—the International Space Station (ISSInternational Space Station).

Journal: Biomaterials
Funder: U.S. National Science Foundation

ASU to host 2 new 51 Pegasi b Fellows, cementing leadership in exoplanet research

Arizona State University
Grant and Award Announcement

Arizona State University continues its rapid rise in planetary astronomy, welcoming two new 51 Pegasi b Fellows to its exoplanet research team in fall 2025. The Heising-Simons Foundationawarded the prestigious postdoctoral fellowships to Matthew Nixon and Sagnick Mukherjee, who will carry out independent research at ASU’s School of Earth and Space Exploration.

Funder: Heising-Simons Foundation

Researchers develop new design and fabrication method to make lightsails for interstellar travel

Brown University
Peer-Reviewed Publication

In a potential step toward sending small spacecraft to the stars, researchers have developed an ultra-thin, ultra-reflective membrane designed to ride a column of laser light to incredible speeds.

Journal: Nature Communications

Atmospheres of new planets might have unexpected mixtures of hydrogen and water

University of California - Los Angeles
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Planets can be extremely hot when they are born, and new computational experiments show that such planets would have an atmosphere composed of a homogenous mixture of hydrogen and water. As the planets age, their temperature decreases, and the hydrogen and water begin to separate. The subsequent rainout of water could not only generate an unexpected amount of heat deep inside these worlds but reshape the composition of atmospheres and evolution of these planets for billions of years. The work has implications for potentially habitable exoplanets with a hydrogen atmosphere overlying a water ocean, depending on the planets’ internal temperatures.

Journal: The Astrophysical Journal Letters

Liquid-crystal platform overcomes optical losses in photonic circuits

SPIE--International Society for Optics and Photonics
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Researchers at the University of Naples Federico II have developed a groundbreaking liquid-crystal-based photonic circuit platform capable of manipulating hundreds of optical modes in a compact, two-dimensional setup. This new optical processor addresses the challenge of optical losses in large-scale photonic systems by maintaining constant losses as the number of modes increases. By extending previous one-dimensional simulations to two-dimensional architectures, the team demonstrated simulations spanning up to 800 optical modes, marking a significant advancement. This technology has the potential to enhance quantum simulations and all-optical AI systems, offering a scalable and efficient approach to complex computational tasks.

Journal: Advanced Photonics

Polymerlike worms wriggle their way through mazes

Universiteit van Amsterdam
Peer-Reviewed Publication

In a crowded room, we naturally move slower than in an empty space. Surprisingly, worms can show the exact opposite behaviour: in an environment with randomly scattered obstacles, they tend to move faster when there are more obstructions. Viewing the worms as ‘active, polymerlike matter’, researchers at the University of Amsterdam have now explained this surprising fact.

Journal: Physical Review

84
85
86
87
88