Space Exploration

Engineers have developed some truly impressive rockets over the decades, including the Saturn V that sent men to the moon. However, they’ve all been chemical rockets, which need an enormous amount of fuel just to slip the bonds of gravity and reach orbit. As NASA sets its sights on more …

An international team of planetary researchers from the University of Edinburgh, UK, and Jilin University, China, has used computer simulations to attempt to solve the mystery of what lies beneath the surfaces of Uranus, Neptune, and extrasolar ‘ice giants.’ Artist’s impression of an extrasolar ‘ice giant.’ Inside our Solar System, …

There’s an eclipse coming up on August 21st, and even with the best possible planning, you won’t be able to see it for longer than two minutes and 40 seconds. That’s the maximum amount of time the moon’s shadow will be visible overlapping the sun from directly in the eclipse’s path, …

It’s hard to get a sense of the scale of the universe from our little corner of it, but scientists realized decades back that the universe is expanding. This naturally led to questions about the distribution and movement of matter out there. There are cosmological models to predict these things, …

China’s FAST (Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope) is the largest radio telescope in the world, dwarfing the 1,000-foot (305-meter) Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico. FAST was a heavy lift for China, with a final price tag of $180 million, and some technical issues that are still being worked out. …

A stunning new image of Jupiter captured by NASA’s Juno robotic orbiter shows a huge storm called the North North Temperate Little Red Spot 1 (NN-LRS-1), the third largest anticyclonic storm on the gas giant. The North North Temperate Little Red Spot 1. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / SwRI …

The Hubble Space Telescope may be old, but it’s often still the best way for astronomers to observe distant objects. For example, the massive exoplanet WASP-121b orbiting a star roughly 900 light years from Earth. Observations of this so-called “hot Jupiter” show that it has a warm stratosphere, a common …

You’ve probably attached images, documents, and a myriad of other files to an email, but what about a life form? That may be possible in the not-too-distant future, according to Synthetic Genomics, a company founded in 2005 by famed geneticist Craig Venter. The company has just unveiled an experimental version …

NASA’s Juno spacecraft took this stunning photo of Jupiter’s most distinctive feature, its Great Red Spot, from orbit. This true color image of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot was taken by the JunoCam imager onboard NASA’s Juno spacecraft on July 10, 2017. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / SwRI / MSSS …

SpaceX has gotten quite adept at launching its Falcon 9 rocket. In fact, it’s becoming commonplace for it to do something no one else can do — land the first stage of that rocket for reuse. SpaceX is not content to just putter around in low-Earth orbit, though. The next …