Space Exploration

  Things have been going swimmingly for NASA’s InSight lander on the surface of Mars. After a textbook landing, InSight found itself in a nice, flat area perfect for deploying its seismic sensors. The weather monitoring package even allowed NASA to set up the first interplanetary weather report. It wouldn’t …

  It’s not a matter of if but when another giant asteroid or comet strikes the Earth. It’s happened all throughout history, and our mere presence on this planet won’t protect it. Although, we are the only species in the history of Earth with rockets and explosives (that we know …

  Twenty years ago, the question of whether Mars ever had large reserves of liquid water was still open to debate. Today, the discussion has shifted to an evaluation of the nature and size of those reserves, where they existed, and what this implies for any effort to find life …

  The NASA Commercial Crew Program is one step closer to sending astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) today. After years of development and months of planning for this specific launch, the SpaceX crewed Dragon capsule (AKA Dragon II) successfully completed a demo flight to dock with the ISS. …

Observations by ESA’s Mars Express orbiter show evidence of an ancient planet-wide groundwater system on the Red Planet. Mosaic of the Valles Marineris hemisphere of Mars projected into point perspective, a view similar to that which one would see from a spacecraft. The distance is 1,550 miles (2,500 km) from …

  We tend to think of our Solar System as a static, constant environment. The implications of the protoplanetary disc and the demarcation line between our inward rocky planets, the outer gas giants, and the farthest “ice giants” all combine to create a nifty little model in which the heaviest …

Collisions between bodies in our Solar System produce impact craters on large objects at a rate that depends on the population of impacting small bodies. By mapping the scars of ancient impacts on the surfaces of Pluto and its moon Charon, planetary researchers have discovered a surprising lack of very …

  Pluto used to be the ninth planet, but it lost that distinction several years back. It became the first of many dwarf planets in the outer reaches of the solar system, but there’s a hint something larger may lurk out there. Scientists have been on the hunt for a …

  It’s a massive undertaking to get a rover to the surface of Mars, so NASA designs its robots to last for at least a couple of months. Luckily, most of them operate for much longer. Opportunity was recently declared lost after 15 years on the red planet. Curiosity is …

Mars today is a cold, dry world, but it may not always have been so. Recent studies increasingly indicate that the planet once had a thicker, denser atmosphere that was able to lock in far greater amounts of warmth, and therefore facilitate and support the flow of liquid water on …