Space News & Blog Articles

How will engineers plan the trajectory of Comet Interceptor, a mission designed to fly by an interstellar visitor, when its target is still unknown?

Two spacecraft are heading for a close Venus encounter: Solar Orbiter passes by on August 9th and BepiColombo on August 10th.

The Perseids are upon us — and as you're looking out for shooting stars, look for Jupiter and Saturn low in the southeast as soon as night begins to fall.

Mysterious spots that scientists thought were subsurface lakes beneath the Martian south pole may instead be ancient clay deposits.

Saturn is at opposition this week, and Jupiter is soon to follow. Will your scope show the Seeliger effect of Saturn's opposition rings? Venus continues to haunt the low west in twilight. And in the south, Sagittarius starts nudging Scorpius aside.

For many, smoke from wildfires has transformed summer nights, blotting out stars and familiar deep-sky sights. But through it all double stars keep on shining.

In some planetary systems, the direction that a star spins and the direction its planets orbit don’t always line up. A new study explores what we can learn from these nonconformists.

See photos — some familiar and some rarely seen — from the Apollo 15 mission, which launched place 50 years ago today.

Asteroids of different sizes crashing on Earth originated from different parts of the main asteroid belt, researchers say; the finding has implications for how often such collisions happen.

Saturn and Jupiter shine in the southeast by late evening. The bright Moon passes them on the 24th through 26th. Venus continues to sit patiently, changelessly, low in the west in twilight. Bootes and the Big Dipper mark the western sky after dark; the Summer Triangle emblazons the east.

Astronomers have made the first clear detection of a dusty disk surrounding an exoplanet, which could eventually go on to form moons.

Roughly a century ago, scientists began using earthquakes as a window to our planet’s interior. Decades after that, Apollo moonquake measurements let scientists poke around the Moon’s insides. Now, we’re […]

Perseverance will soon collect the first of many samples from the Martian surface in a quest to answer whether the planet once hosted life.

Take some time to explore the overlooked masterpiece of Messier 56.

A Milky Way magnetar surprises astronomers by burping up gamma rays right when their predictions anticipated.

Observations of the nearest radio galaxy, Centaurus A, provide the highest-resolution look at the long jets shooting from the galaxy’s supermassive black hole.

After a tense month, the Hubble Space Telescope resumed operations this past weekend.

Astronomers have found a giant gas cloud, likely stripped from its parent galaxy long ago, in a cluster 330 million light-years away.

Venus shines in the western twilight as Mars sinks away. Jupiter and Saturn rise in late dusk. And after dark, Scorpius shows off at its very best in the south.

Keeping your camera cool is an essential element to obtaining good clean images in astrophotography.

Astronomers investigate the spiral arms of a young star's disk and find evidence of a disk so massive that it could collapse to form planets.