Space Exploration

NASA’s Europa Clipper mission is moving toward completion of its final design, followed by the construction and testing of the solar-powered spacecraft and science payload. A 2016 artist’s concept of the Europa Clipper spacecraft. The design is changing as the spacecraft is developed. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech. “We are …

  NASA is moving ahead with one of its most ambitious upcoming missions. The Europa Clipper has cleared a major bureaucratic hurdle, allowing the agency to begin final design and construction of the spacecraft that will explore the icy moon of Jupiter. The mission will begin to take shape over …

Credit: CC0 Public Domain Wind erosion has been ruled out as the primary cause of methane gas release on Mars, Newcastle University academics have shown.   Methane can be produced over time through both geological and biological routes and since its first detection in the Martian atmosphere in 2003, there …

  The Milky Way galaxy is enormous, and we’ve scanned only the tiniest fraction of it in search of planets. We’ve spotted a few thousand of them orbiting distant stars, and now a team of researchers from Penn State University has used that data to estimate the number of Earth-like …

An international team of scientists has found alterations of task-based functional brain connectivity in a group of astronauts after a long-duration spaceflight. The findings appear in the journal Frontiers in Physiology. JAXA astronaut Aki Hoshide, ISS Expedition 32 flight engineer, taking a space selfie during extravehicular activity on September 5, …

A new study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, has ruled out the possibility that the levels of methane detected in the Martian atmosphere could be produced by the wind erosion of rocks, releasing trapped methane from fluid inclusions and fractures on the planets’ surface. A view of Mars showing …

Astrophotographer Jacint Roger has spotted a small object in a sequence of images of 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko taken by ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft on October 21, 2015. At that time, the spacecraft was at over 250 miles (400 km) away from the comet’s center. The Rosetta team is now looking into this large …

An energetic head-on collision between a large planetary embryo and the proto-Jupiter about 4.5 billion years ago could explain puzzling gravitational readings from NASA’s Juno spacecraft, which suggest that Jupiter’s core is less dense and more extended that expected. An artist’s impression of a collision between the proto-Jupiter and a …

  The conventional wisdom is that if you want to look at more distant objects in the universe, you need a bigger telescope. What if you didn’t have to build one, though? A new analysis claims it may be possible to use the Earth’s atmosphere as a giant lens to …

  Jupiter may have been struck by a huge protoplanet long ago, spreading the heavy material inside the planet’s core across a much wider area inside the planet than we’d typically expect to find. That’s the current theory of researchers examining data beamed back by the NASA probe Juno, which …