Science

SpaceX swears that it’s done with all the delays, and it will be ready to fly a crewed mission to the International Space Station (ISS) in April of next year. Until now, it wasn’t clear how the day’s events would go. NASA has selected the crewmen for the mission but …

Future human exploration and habitation on the moon rely on the presence of water hiding out in shadowy craters on the lunar surface. Past missions have provided good evidence that there’s water ice in there, but now we have absolute confirmation that ice exists on the surface thanks to India’s …

Researchers presenting at the Goldschmidt conference in Boston are arguing that the number of planets with significant amounts of water in their atmospheres or crusts may be much higher than previously thought. If true, this could have negative implications for our search for life elsewhere in our galaxy. That might …

Until recently, cameras were exclusively designed to create images for humans — for fun, for art, and for documenting history. With the rapid growth of robots as well as various other kinds of machines and vehicles that need to observe and learn from their environment, many cameras are dedicated to …

Early in Hubble’s mission, it scanned a patch of sky for 10 days to collect 342 separate images. When assembled, they became the now-famous Hubble Deep Field. NASA has updated this iconic image over the years as the telescope became more powerful, and it’s doing so again. Hubble may be …

When the universe was young, there were no stars, galaxies, or even atoms. As space expanded, hydrogen atoms formed and coalesced into stars. Eventually, the first galaxies emerged, and some of those galaxies may still exist. New data from researchers at Durham University in the UK and Harvard in the …

Astronomers are accustomed to seeing supermassive black holes at the heart of large galaxies like our own Milky Way and neighboring galaxies like Andromeda. However, a new analysis suggests there’s a giant black hole hiding in a most unusual place: inside one of the smallest galaxies known to exist. Fornax …

New Horizons launched with a singular purpose: scan the ninth planet up close for the first time ever. Pluto was the ninth planet when New Horizons launched in 2006, but it was just a dwarf planet when the probe got there in 2015. It was still an incredible moment for …

Astronomers have identified thousands of exoplanets with the aid of instruments like the Kepler Space Telescope, but we don’t know much about most of those worlds. From a great distance, Earth and Venus would appear to be very similar, but of course, we know that Earth is quite habitable and …

It has been seven long years since the Space Shuttle retired from service, and American astronauts have been hitching rides on Russian Soyuz rockets ever since. NASA has to pay big bucks for every seat on a Soyuz mission, but the long-delayed Commercial Crew Program is supposed to change that …