Space News & Blog Articles

Each year, cutting-edge technologies developed by the European Space Agency (ESA) for its complex missions and scientific discoveries find new life in applications used to benefit Earth and improve our daily lives.

A Minotaur 4 rocket launches from Space Launch Complex-8 Thursday, April 22, 2010. Image: Vandenberg Space Force Base

Update 3:44 p.m. EDT: A nearby camera confirmed the launch of the Minotaur 4 rocket on Wednesday afternoon.

NASA's Perseverance rover is reveling in a scientific bonanza on Mars after finding a diverse array of rocks that are providing eager scientists a glimpse into the planet's ancient history.

If skies are clear, be sure to watch for the April Lyrid meteors this Easter weekend.Spring in the northern hemisphere brings with it the promise for the Lyrids, the first good meteor shower of the season. Weather is just warming up in April, but we’re not yet in the midst of summer, waiting up late hours for darkness to fall.

A Q&A with Lindley Johnson, a pioneer in blueprinting warning and response scenarios to any potential impact of Earth by an asteroid or comet.

Image: Sombrero Galaxy

The James Webb Space Telescope has spotted the most distant spiral galaxy ever seen, a "Milky Way twin" that existed 1 billion years after the Big Bang.

The night sky will dazzle this week as the Lyrid meteor shower kicks off its annual display, marking the return of one of the oldest and most reliable celestial shows of the year.

Germany's armed forces are planning to build their own constellation of satellites, to avoid becoming reliant on SpaceX's Starlink or other orbiting communications networks.

With the launch of ESA’s Biomass satellite scheduled for 29 April, preparations at Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, have reached a key milestone. The satellite has now been sealed inside the protective fairing of the Vega-C rocket – now hidden from view, the satellite is almost ready for its journey into space.

The Meta Quest 3 is one of the best VR headsets on the market, and now it's on offer for its lowest-ever price when you grab it from Amazon, Walmart or Best Buy.

An AI algorithm designed to look for planetary systems that could host Earth-like, habitable zone planets, has found 44 candidates.

How can we successfully collect and return samples from Mercury and Venus to Earth? This is what a recent study presented at the 56th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference hopes to address as a pair of researchers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) discussed how future missions could successfully conduct sample return missions from the two innermost planets in our solar system. This study has the potential to help scientists, engineers, and mission planners better understand new methods for conducting sample returns throughout the solar system, and specifically from hard-to-reach destinations.

A new cosmic model suggests that singularities could briefly pop into existence, spewing matter and energy into the cosmos, negating the need for dark energy and dark matter.

The European Space Agency just released some new snapshots from its Mars Express orbiter that detail the dynamic terrain of the Red Planet's Acheron Fossae region.

Our Sun, like all stars, is made mostly of hydrogen and helium. They are by far the most abundant elements, formed in the early moments of the Universe. But our star is also rich in other elements astronomers call "metals." Carbon, nitrogen, iron, gold, and more. These elements were created through astrophysical processes, such as supernovae and neutron star collisions. The dust of long-dead stars that gathered together into molecular clouds and formed new, younger stars such as the Sun. Stars rich in metals. But there are still stars out there that are not metal rich. These extremely metal-poor stars, or EMPs, hold clues to the origin of stars in the cosmos.

On Monday (April 14), Aisha Bowe became the first Bahamian woman to launch to space — and she already wants to go back.

Heads up aurora chasers! Powerful geomagnetic storm conditions could trigger northern lights at mid-latitudes overnight as CME impact is detected.

Katy Perry isn't the first performer with space ambitions; Lance Bass, Beyonce, Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber all hoped to be first at one time or another.

When JWST launched, it found the most distant known galaxy: JADES-GS-z14-0, with a redshift of 14.32, and seen about 290 million years after the Big Bang. Now, a team of astronomers has gone even deeper, searching for galaxies in the redshift 15-30 range, which would be galaxies from 270 to 100 million years after the beginning of the Universe. They've found a few candidates in the 15-20 range, but these could be closer, low-mass dusty galaxies.

Planetary nebula Kohoutek 4-55 as viewed by the Hubble Space Telescope.