Space Exploration

  The general idea of a stellar object with such intense gravity that even light cannot escape dates back to the late 18th century. However, it wasn’t until Einstein’s contributions in the early 20th century that we had the necessary theoretical underpinnings to go looking for such an object. Cygnus …

  NASA’s Perseverance rover has been on the surface of Mars for several days, giving the team here on Earth time to run system checks and download preliminary data from the robot. The agency has now released the first large batch of media from the mission, including hundreds of still …

NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance mission captured footage of its rover landing in Jezero Crater on February 18, 2021. The footage was captured by several cameras that are part of the rover’s entry, descent, and landing suite. The views include a camera looking down from the spacecraft’s descent stage, a camera …

  It used to be easy to know how many planets there were: nine. It had been nine planets for an entire generation before scientists started rethinking what counts as a planet. Pluto is out, but some astronomers believe there’s a real ninth planet lurking out there. Others aren’t convinced, …

  About eight and a half years ago, I stayed up until well after midnight to watch Curiosity make Marsfall. At the time, all eyes were glued to what is euphemistically referred to as the “seven minutes of terror.” It took Curiosity and will take Perseverance approximately that long to …

The source of hydrogen chloride (HCl) in the atmosphere of Mars is recent surface volcanism, subsurface magmatic activity, or aerosol chemistry occurring with the Martian dust particles lofted into the atmosphere. HCl increased during the 2018 global dust storm and declined soon after its end, pointing to the exchange between …

  NASA’s Perseverance rover is set to touch down on Mars this week, and we had the opportunity to talk to one of the people who had a hand in bringing this mission to fruition. Adam Steltzner is the chief engineer of the Mars 2020 project at NASA’s Jet Propulsion …

  Space around Mars is much busier than usual right now. The red planet made a close pass of Earth last summer, and numerous space agencies planned their Mars missions around this event. Now, the spacecraft are starting to show up — NASA’s Perseverance rover will land later this month, …

  SpaceX already has a number of lucrative contracts with NASA thanks to its reusable Falcon 9 rocket, not least of which is the recently realized Commercial Crew Program. NASA isn’t just using SpaceX for crewed flights, though. The agency has just awarded SpaceX another cargo contract, this one to …

  NASA is still officially planning to land humans on the moon as part of the Artemis program in 2024, but the latest developments at the agency make that timeline look increasingly unrealistic. After previously expecting to move forward with the development of commercial lunar landers this month, NASA has …