Space Exploration

The Hubble Space Telescope has been sending back iconic and stunning photos of space for decades. But it just caught something particularly special on tape: early stars, from the beginning of the universe. And not only are they some of the earliest stars we’ve ever seen, their very existence confirms …

Water on Earth, Mars and everywhere within the inner Solar System can be traced back to the rapid waist-expanding growth of Jupiter and Saturn, which knocked inwards a local population of icy planetesimals. This is according to a new model, which could also explain the current makeup of our modern …

There is no sound in space, at least not the kind of sound we as humans can detect. There is, however, something akin to sound if you have the right tools to listen to it. NASA‘s Goddard Space Flight Center does, in the form of the Van Allen probes. This pair …

It’s possible to spot many of the manmade objects orbiting Earth from the ground, but not usually with the unaided eye. That could change in the coming days, as a team of Russian engineers and students from the Moscow State Mechanical Engineering University (MAMI) deploy the Mayak satellite. The satellite …

On July 14, 2015, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft made its historic flight through the Pluto system. On the two-year anniversary of the flyby, the New Horizons team is unveiling a set of flyover movies and detailed global maps of Pluto and its largest moon, Charon. A global map of the …

For the last few years, we’ve been able to frame NASA’s research and exploration with the goal of reaching Mars. The agency has been saying it wanted to land a human on the red planet in the 2030s, but now that’s looking less likely. William Gerstenmaier, NASA’s associate administrator for …

Most of us don’t have anything really interesting in our basements, and certainly nothing of historical significance. In the case of a former engineer from Pittsburgh, his basement was home to a pair of NASA computers from the 1960s. After the unnamed engineer passed away, a scrap dealer was preparing …

NASA’s Juno spacecraft has provided planetary researchers the first close-up views of Jupiter’s mysterious, roiling storm called the Great Red Spot. This enhanced-color image of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot was created by citizen scientists Gerald Eichstaedt and Sean Doran using data from the JunoCam imager on NASA’s Juno spacecraft. The …

NASA’s Cassini robotic orbiter captured this incredible view of Epimetheus, an inner satellite of Saturn, during a flyby on February 21, 2017. The flyby had a close-approach distance of 9,300 miles (15,000 km). This image of Saturn’s moon Epimetheus was taken with Cassini’s narrow-angle camera on February 21, 2017, using …

Jupiter’s defining feature is the Great Red Spot, a swirling vortex of gas about 10,250 miles (10,250) kilometers in diameter. We don’t know how long this giant storm has been active, but it may have been observed as early as 1664 by Robert Hooke. All these years later, we’re about …