Space Exploration

  The US and Russia have long employed spy satellites to keep tabs on the world, but what about keeping tabs on the satellites? A pair of satellites are currently locked in a bizarre dance as a Russian probe trails its US counterpart for unknown reasons. Russia swears the satellite …

Pluto’s famous heart-shaped structure, named Tombaugh Regio, controls winds in the atmosphere of the dwarf planet and may give rise to features on its surface, according to a study led by NASA’s Ames Research Center. Published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, the new work confirms that despite a …

New observations from NASA’s Parker Solar Probe show how Sun’s plasma that is released after a solar flare can accelerate and pile up solar energetic particles generating dangerous radiation conditions. NASA’s Parker Solar Probe approaching the Sun. Image credit: NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio. “We’re getting some of the earliest observations …

  NASA’s Parker solar probe started its journey by setting a record — the fastest rocket launch in history. It’s gone on to set several other records as it studied the sun in unprecedented detail. NASA now reports that Parker has broken two of its own records during its latest …

NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) spacecraft has detected sporadic ‘layers’ and ‘rifts’ in the ionosphere — the electrically charged part of the upper atmosphere — of Mars. Graphic illustrating NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft encountering plasma layers at Mars. Image credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center / CI lab. If …

  General relativity makes numerous predictions about gravity, time, and the very nature of the universe. So far, all the predictions we’ve been able to test have held up to scrutiny, but the effects are usually subtle and difficult to visualize. Astronomers have spotted a distant star that further confirms …

  After a series of weather-related delays, SpaceX has successfully launched another batch of Starlink internet satellites. This payload of 60 satellites brings SpaceX’s total count to 240, putting it even farther in the lead as the world’s largest satellite operator. Naturally, SpaceX also recovered the first stage booster for …

  As we peer out into the universe in search of other worlds, we’ve spotted many gas giants orbiting close to their home stars. These so-called “hot Jupiters” have extreme environments, but the planet KELT-9b is in a class of its own. This is the hottest exoplanet ever discovered, and …

A team of researchers from the University of Washington and NASA’s Ames Research Center has analyzed iron-rich micrometeorites collected from 2.7 billion-year-old (Archean Eon) limestone in the Pilbara region of Western Australia and found that these tiny space rocks encountered a carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere on their journey to the planet’s …

  A decade ago, NASA, CERN, and dozens of other institutions banded together to build the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) at a cost of $2 billion. This advanced instrument has helped scientists study dark matter from its perch on the International Space Station, but components have started failing in recent …