Live coverage of the countdown and launch of a Rocket Lab Electron rocket from Launch Complex 1B on Mahia Peninsula in New Zealand carrying NASA’s small CAPSTONE mission to the moon. Text updates will appear automatically below. Follow us on Twitter.
Space News & Blog Articles
Tune into the SpaceZE News Network to stay updated on industry news from around the world.
Contract secures design for ESA’s FORUM satellite
ESA has awarded a contract worth €160 million to Airbus in the UK to build the Earth Explorer FORUM satellite. This exciting new mission will yield unique insight into the planet’s radiation budget and how it is controlled – thereby filling in a critical missing piece of the climate jigsaw.
Gaia Could Detect Free-Floating Black Holes Passing Near Stars in the Milky Way
The thing with black holes is they’re hard to see. Typically we can only detect their presence when we can detect their gravitational pull. And if there are rogue black holes simply traveling throughout the galaxy and not tied to another luminous astronomical, it would be fiendishly hard to detect them. But now we have a new potential data set to do so.
Mini-mission to blaze NASA’s trail back to the moon
An engineer at Tyvak Nano-Satellite Systems inspects solar arrays on NASA’s CAPSTONE spacecraft. Credit: NASA/Dominic Hart
NASA and commercial companies are ready to launch a 55-pound spacecraft from New Zealand to the moon Tuesday on a pathfinder mission to scout the orbit where engineers plan to assemble a mini-space station as a waypoint for astronauts flying to and from the lunar surface.
We Could Discover new Kinds of Particles Around Black Holes Through Gravitational Waves
On February 11th, 2016, researchers at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) announced the detection of gravitational waves (GW) for the first time. As predicted by Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, these waves result from massive objects merging, which causes ripples through spacetime that can be detected. Since then, astrophysicists have theorized countless ways that GWs could be used to study physics beyond the standard models of gravity and particle physics and advance our understanding of the Universe.
Watch private freighter leave space station early Tuesday for fiery death
Northop Grumman's robotic Cygnus freighter is scheduled to undock from the orbiting lab at 6:05 a.m. EDT (1005) Tuesday. Watch it live here at Space.com, courtesy of NASA.
Satellites zoom in on cities' hottest neighborhoods to help combat the urban heat island effect
Landsat satellites have been pinpointing risks of extreme heat within cities.
James Webb Space Telescope team clears 1st instrument for science observations
An exoplanet hunter and first-light detector on the James Webb Space Telescope is ready to do science, six months after the observatory launched to space.
Watch Mercury roll by as BepiColombo probe makes superclose flyby
A new video shows the crater-riddled surface of the solar system's smallest planet Mercury as captured during a super close flyby of the BepiColombo spacecraft.
July full moon 2022: 'Buck supermoon' passes Saturn
The full moon of July also called the "Buck Moon" or "Thunder Moon," will occur July 23 at 10:36 p.m. EDT (0236 GMT on July 24).
Found: Booster Impact Crater on the Farside of the Moon
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission has found the impact site created March 4th. The crater might help reveal the impactor's identity.
After software delays, NASA confirms Psyche asteroid won’t launch mission this year
Artist’s illustration of the Psyche spacecraft at its destination. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
NASA’s billion-dollar Psyche asteroid mission will not launch this year, officials confirmed Friday, after delays in completing software verification testing for the spacecraft’s guidance, navigation and control system.
Celebrate Asteroid Day 2022 with free online broadcast this week
Asteroid research and planetary defense is of great interest to scientists around the world, which is why June 30 marks international Asteroid Day.
Alien super-Earths may get a habitability boost from hydrogen-rich atmospheres
Alien rocky worlds cocooned in hydrogen and helium could prove habitable to life as we know it for billions of years, with key features such as temperate conditions and liquid water, a new study finds.
Planet Neptune will go into reverse as it moves in the sky on Tuesday
Neptune will enter retrograde on Tuesday (June 28) and will appear to 'reverse its course' as it moves across the sky. Here's how to see it.
Did a giant radio telescope in China just discover aliens? Not so FAST…
We should be intrigued, but not too excited (yet). Any interesting signal has to go through a lot of tests to check whether it truly carries the signature of extraterrestrial technology.
The Large Hadron Collider: Inside CERN's atom smasher
The Large Hadron Collider is the world's biggest particle accelerator. It's located at the European particle physics laboratory CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland.
BepiColombo’s second Mercury flyby
Video: 00:01:06
A beautiful sequence of 56 images taken by the monitoring cameras on board the ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission as the spacecraft made its second close flyby of its destination planet Mercury on 23 June 2022.
Po River dries up
Image: The Po River, the longest river in Italy, is hitting record low water levels after months without heavy rainfall. This Copernicus Sentinel-2 animation reveals how the river has significantly shrunk between June 2020 and June 2022.
Dust Devils and Strong Winds Produce the Constant Haze on Mars
Dust is an everyday feature on Mars and wreaks havoc on various pieces of equipment humans decide to send to it, such as Insight’s continual loss of power or the losses of Opportunity and Spirit. But we’ve never really understood what causes the dust to get up into the air in the first place. That equipment that is so affected by it usually isn’t set up to monitor it, or if it is, it has been sent to a place where there isn’t much dust, to begin with. Now, that has changed with new readings from Perseverance in Jerezo crater, and the answer shouldn’t be much of a surprise – dust devils seem to cause some of the dust in the atmosphere on Mars. But strong winds contribute a significant amount too.
Giant Sunspot AR3038 has Doubled in Size and is Pointed Right at Earth. Could be Auroras Coming
Sunspots are typically no real reason to worry, even if they double in size overnight and grow to twice the size of the Earth itself. That’s just what happened with Active Region 3038 (AR3038), a sunspot that happens to be facing Earth and could produce some minor solar flares. While there’s no cause for concern, that does mean a potentially exciting event could happen – spectacular auroras.
