Space Exploration

  It’s not a matter of if a large asteroid hits Earth — it’s when. Space rocks have rained down on Earth long before humans were here, and they’re not going to stop now. However, a team from MIT has conducted a study of all the current plans for deflecting …

Solar Orbiter, a new collaborative mission between ESA and NASA to study our Sun, successfully launched on an Atlas V 411 rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on February 10, 2020. One of its scientific instruments, the magnetometer (MAG), was the first instrument to switch on, less than 24 …

Water makes up about 0.25% (almost three times that of the Sun) of the molecules in Jupiter’s atmospheric molecules at the gas giant’s equator, according to a new analysis of data collected by NASA’s Juno spacecraft. Thick white clouds are present in this JunoCam image of Jupiter’s equatorial zone. These …

  SpaceX has been working toward a crewed NASA launch to the International Space Station (ISS) for years, but that’s not the company’s only plan for human spaceflight. Today, SpaceX and Space Adventures have announced a partnership that will bring Elon Musk’s company fully into the world of space tourism. …

On January 1, 2019, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flew past the Kuiper Belt object (KBO) Arrokoth — provisional designation 2014 MU69, previously nicknamed ‘Ultima Thule’ — at a distance of 3,538 km (2,200 miles). In three new studies published in the journal Science, researchers analyzed new data and images from …

On February 14, 1990, cameras of NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft pointed back toward the Sun and snapped a series of pictures of the Sun, Earth and other planets, making the first ever ‘Family Portrait of the Solar System’ as seen from the outside. One of those images, the picture of Earth, …

  Somewhere in the universe, a highly energetic Fast Radio Burst (FRB) is blasting outward from an unknown object, bathing the sky in radio waves. Scientists may be one step closer to understanding these mysterious signals. A new study of FRBs has revealed the first of these energetic signals that …

Solar Orbiter, a new collaborative mission between the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA to study our Sun, launched at 05:03 CET on February 10, 2020 (11:03 p.m. EST on February 9) on an Atlas V 411 rocket from Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. …

  Boeing and SpaceX are working toward crewed launches for their new spacecraft this year, but there have been setbacks for both companies. While SpaceX seems to have moved past its issues from last year, Boeing is still addressing the failed test flight from December. NASA and Boeing have jointly …

An international team of planetary scientists and geochemists from the United States and Switzerland has demonstrated that a technique called atom probe tomography can be successfully used to characterize the composition and texture of single grains of lunar dust at near-atomic resolution. A tiny grain of lunar soil brought back by …