Space News & Blog Articles

Key Features of Orion

1. Orion’s Belt

The White House's proposed 2026 budget cuts $6 billion in NASA funding and cancels Mars sample return and the Gateway moon-orbiting space station, among other projects.

Galaxy cluster Abell 1489, as imaged by the International Gemini Observatory, contains more than 200 of the gravitationally-bound systems of stars, stellar remnants, interstellar gas and dust.

SpaceX conducted a static fire test of a Starship upper-stage vehicle this week, continuing to gear up for the megarocket's ninth test flight.

The James Webb Space Telescope has observed surface ice methanol — a key building block for organic compounds necessary for life, including sugars — on trans-Neptunian objects.

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Astrophysicist and Nobel Prize Laureate Didier Queloz answers the who, what, where, when and why of exoplanets in this 3-part series. 

Has your dinner time conversations been dragging a bit of late? Feel like raising its knowledge level to a bit higher than the usual synopsis of the most recent reality TV show? Then take the challenge presented by Sean Carroll in his book "The Biggest Ideas in the Universe – Space, Time and Motion". Using this, your conversation might soon be sparkling with grand thoughts about modern physics, time travel, going faster than light and the curvature of the universe.

DARPA (the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is looking for a private company to build spacecraft to orbit the moon and search for water.

As the new Biomass satellite settles into life in orbit following its launch on 29 April, ESA has released its most extensive satellite-based maps of above-ground forest carbon to date. Spanning nearly two decades, the dataset offers the clearest global picture yet of how forest carbon stocks have changed over time.

Week in images: 28 April - 02 May 2025

The soon-to-reenter Soviet Cosmos 482 Venus probe is getting increased attention by satellite trackers – and new imagery provides some interesting details.

Orion, the next spacecraft to fly humans around the moon, has been delivered to NASA for prelaunch preparations ahead of Artemis 2's planned 2026 liftoff.

The Red Planet will buzz the Beehive during May 4-5, with the moon joining the party on May 3.

A unique type of bacteria appears to have social groups — left alone, they'd die.

Image: The Ocean and Land Colour Instrument on Copernicus Sentinel-3 captured this image of Earth’s biggest iceberg, A23a, on 5 April 2025.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Florida's Space Coast on Thursday night (May 1), carrying 28 Starlink satellites to low Earth orbit.

The Juno spacecraft circling in Jovian space is the planetary science gift that just keeps on giving. Although it's spending a lot of time in the strong (and damaging) Jovian radiation belts, the spacecraft's instruments are hanging in there quite well. In the process, they're peering into Jupiter's cloud tops and looking beneath the surface of the volcanic moon Io.

NASA will keep trying for another six weeks to revive its water-hunting Lunar Trailblazer moon probe, which went silent a day after its Feb. 26 launch.

As we prepare for the arrival of Metroid Prime 4, here's the complete timeline of the entire Metroid series, in both chronological and release order.

NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers conducted history's fifth all-female spacewalk on May 1, moving an antenna and partially preparing the ISS for a new set of solar arrays.

As young stars form, they exert a powerful influence on their surroundings and create complex interactions between them and their environments. As they gobble up gas and dust, they generate a rotating disk of material. This protoplanetary disk is where planets form, and new research shows that stars can feed too quickly and end up regurgitating material back into the disk.