Space Exploration

NASA has released the first image from the historic Ultima Thule flyby taken with New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) camera. Ultima Thule. Image credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute. New Horizons flew past Ultima Thule at 12:33 a.m. EST (5:33 a.m. …

On January 1st, 2019, at 12:33 a.m. EST (5:33 a.m. GMT), NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft will fly past a Kuiper Belt object known as 2014 MU69 (nicknamed Ultima Thule). A schedule of New Horizons Ultima Thule flyby events. Image credit: NASA. Ultima Thule is orbiting in the heart of Kuiper …

The ‘bow shock’ is the first boundary the solar wind encounters as it approaches planets or comets. From 2014 to 2016, ESA’s Rosetta orbiter studied 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko and its surroundings from near and far. The spacecraft flew directly through the bow shock several times both before and after the comet reached …

Over the past three months, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has been taking images to measure the brightness of its next flyby target — a Kuiper belt object nicknamed Ultima Thule (also known as 2014 MU69) — and how the brightness varies as the object rotates. Even though New Horizons team …

Scientists are still unsure if liquid water exists on Mars, but we know there’s plenty of water ice. The ice on Mars is usually diffuse and found in small pockets mixed with frozen carbon dioxide, but the Mars Express probe just beamed back images of a massive deposit of pristine …

New images from the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft show an impact crater in the northern lowlands of Mars. Known as Korolev, this 51-mile (82 km) wide crater is filled with water ice all year round. Perspective view of Korolev crater. Image credit: ESA / …

December 19th was supposed to be a banner day for the spaceflight industry. We expected as many as five launches in just one day, but things took a turn early on as the first rockets were set to take off. Of the five possible launches, only two of them headed …

Landing InSight on the surface of Mars was an incredible feat all by itself, but the robot has just successfully completed its first major mission milestone. After carefully surveying the nearby terrain, NASA pinpointed a location to deploy the lander’s Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS). InSight successfully placed the …

On Wednesday, December 19, 2018, NASA’s InSight lander deployed its first instrument — the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS) — onto the surface of Mars. NASA’s InSight lander placed its seismometer on Mars on December 19, 2018. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech. “Seismometer deployment is as important as landing …

When we think about the planets, we tend to think of them as static and unchanging. While the planets unquestionably evolved into their current states, most of that evolution appears to have happened hundreds of millions to billions of years in the past. Mars has been a cold, frozen rock …