Space Exploration

Future manned trips to Mars will require on-site resources, including water, and planetary scientists from a project called ‘Subsurface Water Ice Mapping (SWIM) on Mars’ are mapping the availability of potential water-ice sources across the Martian surface. Artist’s concept of humans working on Mars. Image credit: NASA / Johnson Space …

Evidence of an enormous solar storm that struck the Earth around 2,610 years ago has been found in ice cores from Greenland. An artist’s illustration of events on the Sun changing the conditions in near-Earth space. Image credit: NASA. Our Sun sometimes produces highly energetic particles, which are accelerated either …

Using data from the LAMP (Lyman Alpha Mapping Project) instrument aboard NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, planetary researchers have observed water molecules moving around the dayside of the Moon. A view of the Moon’s south pole showing where reflectance and temperature data indicate the possible presence of surface water ice. Image …

After eight months of effort and sending more than a thousand commands in an attempt to restore contact with the Mars rover Opportunity, NASA declared its mission complete on February 13, 2019. The newly-released images are the final photos Opportunity took on the Red Planet as a dust storm darkened …

Bennu — the target of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security-Regolith Explorer) spacecraft mission — is a B-type asteroid with a 1,614-foot (492 m) diameter. It completes an orbit around the Sun every 436.6 days (1.2 years) and every 6 years comes very close to Earth, within …

  The Opportunity rover has gone to a better place — Mars. Then about 15 years after reaching Mars, it shut down for good in the midst of a planet-wide dust storm. Before the plucky little rover passed on, it beamed back one final gift to the people of Earth: …

  People used to argue about whether or not planets like the eight (or more) in our solar system were rare. Starting in the 1990s with the discovery of the first exoplanets, it became clear planets are common around other stars. What about planets without stars? Astronomers have identified a …

  We know our Milky Way galaxy is big, but how big has been something of an open question. In the past, estimates of the total mass ranged from 500 billion to 3 trillion solar masses. It was difficult to pin down because of the unmeasurable dark matter making up …

  Satellites are physically quite secure orbiting the Earth, but the advent of cheaper high-power antennas makes them vulnerable in other ways. Engineers have only recently started taking cybersecurity seriously in satellite design, and as PCMag reports, that means hacking a satellite might not be as difficult as you think. …

  On March 7, 2009, the Kepler Space Telescope took off from Cape Canaveral aboard a Delta II rocket. For almost a decade, the space telescope expanded our understanding of the universe before it finally went dark for good last October. But it’s worth revisiting the spacecraft one last time, …