Space Exploration

The sun is a giant nuclear fireball that, as a rule, melts anything that comes close. Yet, there’s a NASA plan to send a spacecraft into the sun’s upper atmosphere to get a closer look at it and gather data on coronal mass ejections (CME). The spacecraft is called Solar …

SpaceX successfully launched and landed its reusable rocket! This achievement was the first time we’ve ever managed to launch, land, refurbish, and re-use a rocket for a second launch. SpaceX is calling the rocket, a Falcon 9, “flight-proven” as opposed to “secondhand,” “used” or “reused.” The entire launch and landing …

Looking ahead to the “spiritual, social, and psychological needs” of lunar colonists, Jorge Mañes Rubio, the ESA’s artist in residence, wants to build a temple near the south pole of the moon. Rubio’s vision for a temple entails building a dome on the rim of the 21-km-wide Shackleton Crater. Such an …

NASA has spent decades pushing the bounds of human innovation and exploration, and it’s documented every second of it in excruciating detail. Finding all those images and videos used to be a pain, but no more. NASA has announced a new searchable version of its public Image and Video Library. You …

Low-density organic granules that cover the surface of Saturn’s moon Titan are ‘electrically charged,’ according to new experiments done by scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology. An artist’s rendering of the surface of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. Image credit: Benjamin de Bivort, debivort.org / CC BY-SA 3.0. The research, …

NASA’s Juno spacecraft successfully completed its fifth flyby of the gas giant Jupiter on March 27, 2017. Part of Jupiter’s ‘string of pearls.’ Juno captured this image with its JunoCam instrument on March 27, 2017. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / SwRI / MSSS. At the time of closest approach, …

Most large galaxies like our own Milky Way have a supermassive black hole in the center. It’s so common that astronomers just expect to see the telltale signs of a black hole in the heart of galaxies. But a new observation of a galaxy some 8 billion light years away …

It took a lot of clever engineering behind the scenes and some very public failures, but SpaceX has finally worked out the kinks of landing its Falcon 9 rockets after launch. It’s been recovering rockets so frequently that we don’t even cover all the landings anymore, but until now all those …

Comets, it turns out, are rather more active places than we thought. Comet 67P, where we left Rosetta and Philae not too long ago, is one such happenin’ spot. Scientists poring over photos by Rosetta and Philae have unearthed evidence of a spectacular landslide on 67P — and we caught …

NASA’s Curiosity rover will have been on Mars for five years come this summer, and it’s held up surprisingly well. The rover’s mission has been extended essentially indefinitely. As long as Curiosity can do science, NASA will make use of it. The harsh Martian terrain has not been kind to …