Blue Origin conducted a roughly 40-second-long static fire of its New Glenn rocket on Oct. 30, 2025. This hotfire of the seven BE-4 engines is a precursor to the launch of NASA’s EscaPADE mission. Image: Adam Bernstein / Spaceflight Now
Blue Origin lit up a pocket of Florida’s Space Coast Thursday night when it hot fired its New Glenn rocket for an engine test lasting roughly 40 seconds in duration.
The Vera Rubin Observatory (VRO) hasn't yet begun it's much-anticipated Legacy Survey of Space and Time. But it saw its first light in June 2025, when it captured its Virgo First Look images as part of commisioning its main camera. Those images are a sample of how the observatory will perform the LSST and feature the Virgo Cluster of galaxies.
The Kepler Belt, also known as the Edgeworth-Kepler Belt, is a circum-stellar disc in the outer Solar System, extending from the orbit of Neptune at 30 AU (astronomical units) to approximately 50 AU from the Sun. It is similar to the asteroid belt, but it is far larger—20 times as wide and 20 to 200 times as massive. Like the asteroid belt, it consists mainly of small bodies, or remnants from the Solar System's formation.
Nature's like a photographer's canvas backdrop, lit up by the different types of electromagnetic radiation. Gamma radiation is the most powerful, strong enough to rip your double helix in two. Radio waves are at the low end. They're generally safe, and are almost omnipresent; we live in a sea of radio waves.
A new study has found that the 260-day ritual calendar is the key to understanding how the Maya predicted solar eclipses.
What if I told you that while you can’t see dark matter, maybe you can hear it? I know, I know, it sounds crazy…and it is crazy. But it’s crazy enough that it just might work. It’s a real life experiment, called the…let me see here…the Cryogenic Rare Event Search with Superconducting Thermometers, or CRESST – that’s a double s in case you didn’t catch that. Look it’s not the greatest of acronyms but we’re going to just go with it.
A new James Webb Space Telescope image showcases the gorgeous Red Spider Nebula against a backdrop of twinkling stars.
Mike French (left) hosted a fireside chat with former NASA administrators Jim Bridenstine (center) and Charles Bolden (right) at the 2025 von Braun Space Exploration Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama. Image: American Astronautical Society via livestream
Two former NASA Administrators called on the space agency to rethink its plans to land astronauts on the Moon using SpaceX’s Starship, saying development of the revolutionary vehicle was taking too long and required unnecessary complexity.
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Follow the online briefing on the launch scheduled for 4 November 2025. The Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission delivers radar images of Earth’s surface. It is vital for disaster response teams, environmental agencies, maritime authorities, climate scientists.
We successfully plugged the hole in the ozone layer that was discovered in the 1980s by banning ozone depleting substances such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). But, it seems we might be unintentionally creating another potential atmospheric calamity by using the upper atmosphere to destroy huge constellations of satellites after a very short (i.e. 5 year) lifetime. According to a new paper by Leonard Schulz of the Technical University of Braunschweig and his co-authors, material from satellites that burn up in the atmosphere, especially transition metals, could have unforeseen consequences on atmospheric chemistry - and we’re now the biggest contributor of some of those elements.
Why is it important to know about exoplanets having their atmospheres stripped while orbiting F-type stars? This is what a recent study submitted to *The Astronomical Journal* hopes to address as an international team of scientists conducted a first-time investigation into atmospheric escape on planets orbiting F-type stars, the latter of which are larger and hotter than our Sun. Atmospheric escape occurs on planets orbiting extremely close to their stars, resulting in the extreme temperature and radiation from the host star slowly stripping away the planet’s atmosphere.
It's a well-known fact that Jupiter plays a vital role in the dynamics of the Solar System. As the largest planet beyond the "Frost Line," the boundary where volatiles (like water) freeze, Jupiter protects the planets of the inner Solar System from potential impacts by asteroids and comets. In addition to this "guardian" role, Jupiter has also been an "architect" planet that affected the evolution of the early Solar System and the orbits of its planets. According to new research from Rice University, Jupiter reshaped the Solar System by carving rings and gaps in the protoplanetary disk, leading to the formation of late-stage meteorites.
We are truly lucky to live in an age where modern instruments - like the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) - exist and are pulling back the veil on the period known as the Cosmic Dark Ages (aka. the Epoch of Reionization). Thanks to its sophisticated suite of infrared optics and spectrometers, Webb has observed some of the earliest galaxies in the Universe, shedding new light on the formation history and evolution of the cosmos. Alas, there are still many unanswered questions about the first stars (Population III), galaxies, and black holes formed.
The concept of the "Goldilocks Zone," more formally known as the Circumstellar Habitable Zone (CHZ), refers to the region around a star where the temperature is just right for liquid water to exist on a planet's surface. Earth's fortunate placement within our Sun's Goldilocks Zone is a primary reason for the abundance of life as we know it.
A nearby dwarf galaxy could teach astrophysicists something new about dark matter and black holes. It's named Segue 1 and it's about 75,000 light years away. Segue 1 is one of the Milky Way's smallest and dimmest satellite galaxies. It has about 600,000 solar masses and is only as bright as about 300 Suns.
Gravitational wave telescopes work in a very different way than optical or radio telescopes, but they do have one thing in common: they are tuned to a specific range of frequencies.
As a kid you ever play that game Guess Who? If you haven’t, it’s actually kinda fun. You have two players, each with a board in front of them. On the board are a bunch of flip cards with different characters. You have to guess your opponent’s secret identity through a process of elimination. You ask if they’re a kid or an adult, or a boy or a girl, or if they’re wearing glasses or bald. If you ask the right questions, and eliminate the correct possibilities, you’re left with only one remaining option: your opponent’s secret identity.
An alien comet will soon depart from the Sun's glare and enter the morning sky. Get ready for the observing opportunity of a lifetime.
In partnership with NASA, Lockheed Martin Skunk Works has executed the first test flight of the X-59 quiet supersonic aircraft. This week's first flight was subsonic, but eventually the plane will demonstrate technologies aimed at reducing sonic booms to gentle thumps.
Four teams from different countries have been recognised for their breakthrough work in using artificial intelligence to detect earthquake damage from space, marking the conclusion of a global competition organised by the European Space Agency in collaboration with the International Charter ‘Space and Major Disasters’ – commonly referred to as ‘the Charter’.
A massive coronal mass ejection erupted from the sun's far side late on Oct. 21, 2025 and was captured by a NOAA coronagraph.
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