Space News & Blog Articles

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Remember That Rocket That was Going to Crash Into the Moon? Scientists Think They've Found the Crater

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) – NASA’s eye-in-the-sky in orbit around the Moon – has found the crash site of the mystery rocket booster that slammed into the far side of the Moon back on March 4th, 2022. The LRO images, taken May 25th, revealed not just a single crater, but a double crater formed by the rocket’s impact, posing a new mystery for astronomers to unravel.

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Supernovae Were Discovered in all These Galaxies

The Hubble space telescope has provided some of the most spectacular astronomical pictures ever taken. Some of them have even been used to confirm the value of another Hubble – the constant that determines the speed of expansion of the Universe. Now, in what Nobel laureate Adam Reiss calls Hubble’s “magnum opus,” scientists have released a series of spectacular spiral galaxies that have helped pinpoint that expansion constant – and it’s not what they expected.

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VY Canis Majoris is Dying, and Astronomers are Watching

Three-dimensional models of astronomical objects can be ridiculously complex. They can range from black holes that light doesn’t even escape to the literal size of the universe and everything in between. But not every object has received the attention needed to develop a complete model of it, but we can officially add another highly complex model to our lists. Astronomers at the University of Arizona have developed a model of VY Canis Majoris, a red hypergiant that is quite possibly the largest star in the Milky Way. And they’re going to use that model to predict how it will die.

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NASA's CAPSTONE cubesat launch to the moon delayed again for systems checks

NASA has called off plans to launch a small cubesat to the moon on Monday (June 27) to allow more time to check its Rocket Lab booster for flight.

NASA Funds the Development of a Nuclear Reactor on the Moon That Would Last for 10 Years

If NASA’s Artemis project to return to the Moon permanently is going to succeed, it will need a lot of power. Shipping traditional fossil fuels up there is impractical, and surface solar cells won’t work for the two weeks that a given side of the Moon is shadowed. So the best option may be to set up a nuclear power station. NASA solicited some ideas along those lines with a preliminary design request for proposal – and they recently announced that three groups would each receive $5 million to develop preliminary designs for surface-based lunar fission reactors.

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