Space Exploration

  We’ve known about the likely presence of ice reserves on the Moon for decades, but we haven’t actually sent a dedicated ground-based probe to check our nearest neighbor. Instead, the presence of water ice in shadowed craters at the Moon’s south pole has been intuited from various space-based measurements …

  In 2017, scientists around the world were excited by the news that the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) project had detected gravitational waves from the collision of two neutron stars. This discovery confirmed a pivotal prediction of general relativity, and eventually earned multiple Nobel Prizes. A new study now …

NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity snapped a view of itself and its surroundings on October 11, 2019 (the 2,553rd Martian day, or Sol, of its mission). The selfie (high-resolution version) is composed of 57 individual images taken by the rover’s Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI), a camera on the end of …

  One of the major unanswered questions in astronomy is how our modern system of galaxies evolved into its present-day configuration in the first place. Now, researchers have found evidence of a massive galaxy that formed when the universe was far younger than it today, with a very different configuration …

  Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk is not afraid to shill for his company’s products, but he gets fewer chances with his work at SpaceX. After all, most of us aren’t in the market for space launch services, but we might be interested in satellite internet as an alternative …

Vast longitudinal dunes up to 330 feet (100 m) in height in the equatorial deserts of Saturn’s moon Titan are the Solar System’s most monumental surface structures, but the chemical composition of their dark organics remains a fundamental, unsolved enigma, with acetylene ice detected near the dunes implicated as a …

A team of planetary researchers from the Lunar and Planetary Institute (LPI) and elsewhere has found that a volcanic flow on Venus’ Ovda Regio highlands plateau is made of basaltic lava and isn’t silica-rich. This discovery weakens the notion that Venus might once have been Earth-like with an ocean of …

  NASA is talking a lot about long-term missions like new trips to the moon and the possibility of human voyages to Mars, but its latest mission is a bit closer to home. The Ionospheric Connection Explorer (ICON) spacecraft is finally in orbit after years of delays. This probe orbits …

Lunar orbiters such as India’s Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft and NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) recently detected water icy on the floor of some of the south polar craters, but no one is sure exactly when or how that ice got there. A new study by researchers from Brown University and NASA’s …

  The small, standardized satellites known as “Cubesats” have increased access to space — many launches include caches of Cubesats along with the main payload. Those tiny satellites are all hanging out around Earth, but that could change soon. Virgin Orbit, the rocket-based spinoff of Virgin Galactic, has signed a …