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.
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.
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.
Rocket Lab will launch NASA's CAPSTONE cubesat to the moon from New Zealand atop an Electron booster and you can watch it live online.
NASA revisits a spectacular Hubble Space Telescope shot of the dwarf galaxy ESO 318-13 in this stunning photo.
At 468 days in space, Buzz Lightyear has spent the longest time ever in space on a single mission.
The moon will pass close to Mercury in the predawn sky on Monday (June 27). Find out how and where to see this skywatching event.
You can watch the five naked-eye planets align for free on a livestream that will be running Sunday (June 26).
Researchers have found a new way to detect some of the most cataclysmic mergers in the universe before they happen.
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