Space Exploration

  The Curiosity rover has already had a tremendously successful mission on Mars, but it’s not done making discoveries yet. NASA reports that the rover has detected a perplexing increase in oxygen concentrations on the red planet. While the cause is unclear, this comes just months after the rover detected …

  SpaceX has cleared a major hurdle on the way to launching manned missions with its Dragon spacecraft. The company had to push back its launch plans after the stunning explosion of a Crew Dragon capsule during testing earlier this year. Now, SpaceX has successfully tested the engines without incident, …

Using data from the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM) instrument aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, researchers have detected hydrated silica — a mineral good at preserving biosignatures — in Jezero Crater, the landing site of the agency’s upcoming Mars 2020 rover mission. This image from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance …

Ultima Thule (also known as 2014 MU69), the Kuiper Belt Object that was the target of the January 1, 2019 flyby by NASA’s New Horizons mission, has been officially named Arrokoth, a Native American term meaning ‘sky’ in the Powhatan/Algonquian language. This composite image of Ultima Thule was compiled from …

The Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument onboard NASA’s Curiosity rover has measured the seasonal changes in the gases that fill the air directly above the surface of Gale Crater, and noticed something baffling: oxygen behaves in a way that so far planetary scientists cannot explain through any known atmospheric …

  It has been a quiet fall for SpaceX, which launched a Falcon 9 rocket early August before taking a break to prepare for future missions. Now, SpaceX has successfully deployed a new batch of Starlink internet satellites, and the Falcon 9 that delivered them made history in the process. …

Humanity first left the solar system in 2012 when the Voyager 1 probe passed into interstellar space decades after leaving the planets behind. Now, there’s a second spacecraft beyond the limits of our solar system: Voyager 2. Luckily, Voyager 2’s instruments are in somewhat better shape than Voyager 1’s, so …

  Hygiea is the 10th asteroid discovered in the Asteroid Belt and the fourth-largest asteroid by mass. While one of the largest asteroids, its dark surface made it difficult to distinguish from Earth using telescopes of the day. Ceres was discovered in 1801, but Hygiea (formal designation: 10 Hygiea) wasn’t located …

  It’s been nearly eight years since Curiosity launched from Cape Canaveral, and the aging rover should soon have company on the Red Planet. The Mars 2020 rover, currently being assembled at JPL, has met a major launch milestone and is now standing on its own six wheels. NASA celebrated …

  NASA’s InSight lander doesn’t get as much attention as the Curiosity rover, but it has been on Mars and making history for almost a year. It’s sent back weather reports from the red planet, recorded the ghostly sounds of the Martian wind, and deployed the first-ever seismometer on another …