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.
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.
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.
Landsat satellites have been pinpointing risks of extreme heat within cities.
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.
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.
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).
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission has found the impact site created March 4th. The crater might help reveal the impactor's identity.
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.
Asteroid research and planetary defense is of great interest to scientists around the world, which is why June 30 marks international Asteroid Day.
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.
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.
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 is the world's biggest particle accelerator. It's located at the European particle physics laboratory CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland.
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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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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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