Space Exploration

  NASA’s OSIRIS-REx probe is about to make history, but the agency isn’t taking any chances. In the coming months, OSIRIS-REx will descend to the surface of the asteroid Bennu to pick up a sample, but NASA wants to get a closer look at the area before sending the spacecraft …

Willpower is the current in a lengthy line of Red Planet vagabonds to be called by school-age youngsters, from Sojourner in 1997 to the Spirit and also Opportunity wanderers, which arrived at Mars in 2004, to Curiosity, which has actually been discovering Mars given that 2012. This musician’s principle portrays …

Mars is an unusual as well as terrific location. Not just is it the only world booming completely by robotics, yet it additionally has a remarkable geological background. A picture caught in 2011 has actually been making the rounds after it showed up on the NASA scientific research blog site …

  SpaceX initially wanted to conduct a high-altitude test of its Starship vehicle last year, but setbacks pushed the timeline into 2020. Now, SpaceX may be looking at another delay. The company’s Starship SN1 prototype just blew its top at the company’s Boca Chica, Texas facility. The rocket was undergoing …

  Astronomers observing the universe have detected some massive bursts of energy over the years, but nothing compares with the blast recently spotted by scientists at the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research. The explosion some 390 million light-years away is the largest ever recorded. The epicenter of the eruption …

On January 3, 2019, China National Space Administration’s Chang’e-4 probe successfully landed on the eastern floor of Von Karman, a 180-km- (112 mile) wide crater located within an even larger impact crater known as the South Pole-Aitken basin, becoming the first spacecraft to land safely on the Moon’s farside. The …

  NASA’s InSight lander has been on Mars for more than a year now, and it’s slowly revealing new facets of the red planet’s story. We used to think of Mars as a dead world, but missions like InSight have increasingly shown there’s a little life left in Mars. In …

  SpaceX can move forward with its plans to build rockets in Los Angeles following a unanimous vote by the LA City Council. The 12-0 vote paves the way for Elon Musk’s spaceflight company to use a large tract of land at the Port of Los Angeles to conduct research …

  China’s Chang’e-4 lander made history when it completed the first-ever soft landing on the far side of the moon in January 2019. After the landing, Chang’e-4 deployed the Yutu-2 rover to explore the surface in greater detail. Now, the team has spotted some very unusual rocks scattered around Von …

Listen to would-be space explorers for long enough, and eventually they will likely argue that humans must develop outposts on other worlds in case of disaster here on Earth, as a so-called Planet B. But that’s a dangerous narrative, said Kathryn Denning, an anthropologist at York University in Canada who …