Space Exploration

The 70 km- (43.5-mile) diameter Yarrabubba impact structure in Western Australia is approximately 2.23 billion years old, according to new research led by Curtin University scientists. Composite aeromagnetic anomaly map of the Yarrabubba impact structure within the Yilgarn Craton, Western Australia, showing the locations of key outcrops and samples used …

  SpaceX CEO Elon Musk made waves a while back with an ambitious plan to begin ferrying people to Mars within the next several years. He was understandably vague on details, but now he’s got a bit more to share. It still sounds like we’re a long way from colonizing …

The High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) onboard ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft has captured a new image of the icy cap at the Martian north pole, complete with bright swathes of ice, dark troughs and depressions, and signs of strong winds. This HRSC image shows plumes of dust clouds over the …

  Scientists used to wonder how common planets were throughout the universe, and now we know — they’re everywhere. Even with our relatively rudimentary methods of detecting exoplanets, we’ve identified thousands of alien worlds, including some in our own backyard. In 2016, astronomers discovered an exoplanet around Proxima Centauri, the …

A new study, published in the journal Nature Astronomy, suggests that our young Solar System’s protoplanetary disk was divided into two regions: on the one side were terrestrial planets, such as Earth and Mars, made up of fundamentally different types of materials than the more distant Jovian planets, such as …

A team of researchers from the United States, Switzerland and Australia has found 4.6 to 7-billion-year-old presolar grains of silicon carbide (SiC) in the Murchison meteorite, a large C2 chondrite that fell in Australia in 1969. Scanning electron microscope image of the 6.2-billion-year-old grain of silicon carbide from the Murchison …

  NASA has inched closer to completing its next Mars rover with a milestone driving test. The team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California fired up the Mars 2020 rover and allowed to to drive around the Spacecraft Assembly Facility clean room. NASA reports the rover passed the …

  Astronomers are currently wrestling with something of a mystery. In 2016, a team of researchers in Sweden noticed that a star visible in an image from 1950 was no longer visible. Astronomers have started looking at other images from the last century, and they’ve found more missing stars, about …

  Today was supposed to be a day of celebration for Boeing — after years of development, the CST-100 Starliner spacecraft was due to make its first trip to the International Space Station (ISS). The mission started smoothly with a textbook launch, but things went wrong when the CST-100 tried …

  Astronomers have released new photos of comet 2I/Borisov, the second known interstellar visitor to our solar system after ’Oumuamua passed through in 2017. Discovered by amateur astronomer Gennady Borisov, the comet made its closest approach to the Sun on December 8, 2019. NASA has released a pair of photos …