Space Exploration

  Geologic processes, like your mother, are both fundamentally responsible for life as we know it and probably something you don’t think about very much. (You did call your mother on Sunday, right?) Geologists are interested in the geological activity going on across the solar system because we know these …

  All of humanity currently lives on (or in orbit very near) the planet Earth. A global catastrophe could wipe us all out, but having a “backup” of humanity on other planets would make that impossible. Mars is a natural target for colonization, but what would the first human residents …

On April 24, 2019, NASA’s Mars Odyssey orbiter captured a new thermal image of Phobos, the larger of Mars’ two moons. Each color in the full-moon image represents a temperature range detected by Odyssey’s Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) camera. These three views of the Martian moon Phobos were taken …

  When it comes to the history of the universe, figuring out how we got what we currently exist in based on our understanding of what the earliest conditions were is something of a fun scientific puzzle, if the phrase “fun scientific puzzle” translates to “a major field of study …

  “Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space.” — Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Hubble astronomers have …

  There’s no fountain of youth to turn back time, but it might be possible to hold back the ravages of age just a little. An ESA experiment that just arrived on the International Space Station (ISS) will test nanoparticles as a way to clear the body of free radicals. …

In April 2019, NASA’s InSight lander used its Instrument Deployment Camera (IDC) to capture a series of Martian sunrise and sunset images. NASA’s InSight lander used its IDC camera to record the Martian sunrise on April 24, 2019. This image was taken around 5:30 a.m. Mars local time. Image credit: …

According to new research, a nearby binary neutron-star merger gave birth to 0.3% of the Earth’s heaviest elements, including gold, platinum and uranium; such an event may have occurred about 1,000 light-years away from the Pre-solar Nebula, approximately 80 million years before the formation of our Solar System. Merging neutron …

  SpaceX has finally confirmed what we all suspected — its Dragon II spacecraft was totally destroyed during a test late last month. The admission comes from the company’s vice president of mission assurance Hans Koenigsmann. During a recent press event, Koenigsmann addressed the loss of the capsule and provided …

A duo of researchers from the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University has made the first-ever measurements of ancient water contained in samples collected by JAXA’s Hayabusa mission from the peanut-shaped asteroid (25143) Itokawa. The results appear in the journal Science Advances. The S-type asteroid Itokawa. …