Space Exploration

NASA’s Twins Study brought ten teams of researchers from around the country together to observe what physiological, molecular and cognitive changes could happen to a human from exposure to spaceflight hazards. Retired NASA astronauts Scott Kelly and his identical twin brother Mark, participated in the investigation, conducted by NASA’s Human …

Russell Steele The OneWeb satellite has been described to be about the size of a beer refrigerator. That may be hard for some to visualize in the above graphic, so here is a beer refrigerator sold on Amazon. The SpaceX Starlink satellite is reported to be 1.1 meters (39in) long …

Metallic asteroids are the cooled cores of disrupted planetesimals. They originated early in the history of our Solar System when planets were beginning to form. University of California Santa Cruz planetary researchers Jacob Abrahams and Professor Francis Nimmo think that as the metal cooled and solidified, volcanoes spewing liquid iron …

From the ground, the dance of the northern lights, or aurora borealis, can look peaceful. But those shimmering sheets of colored lights are the product of violent collisions between Earth’s atmosphere and particles from the Sun. Understanding the contribution that aurora make to the total amount of energy that enters …

  It has been more than a year since SpaceX successfully completed the first demo flight of the long-awaited Falcon Heavy, and today could be its first commercial flight. Following a last-minute delay, SpaceX expects to launch the Arabsat-6A from NASA’s historic Pad 39A this evening. The Falcon Heavy makes …

On April 4, 2019, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe achieved its second perihelion (close approach) of the Sun and flew within 15 million miles (24 million km) of our star’s surface. NASA’s Parker Solar Probe approaching the Sun. Image credit: Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. “Parker Solar Probe is performing …

NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity has captured several stunning videos of solar eclipses from the surface of the Red Planet. Phobos transits the Sun’s disk, as seen by NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity on March 26, 2019. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS. Martian moons Phobos and Deimos orbit in synchronous …

  Few objects in the universe hold the same mystique as a black hole. These collapsed stars distort space and time, pulling in anything nearby with unfathomable gravity. Even light cannot escape their pull. That’s why they’re so mysterious — we can’t see black holes, but a project called the …

  Earth is currently enjoying the best eons of the sun’s life, but that friendly yellow globe in the sky won’t last forever. No matter what we do, the sun will one day destroy the world, leaving a fractured planetary corpse orbiting a dead star. Astronomers have spotted a distant …

  Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has a well-known interest in space after founding Blue Origin, his own private space firm. Now, Amazon is reportedly on the verge of launching thousands of satellites that would provide global internet access. The effort, known as Project Kuiper, looks like a direct challenge to …