Space Exploration

There’s nothing novel about the idea of charging someone big bucks for a trip into space. Russia started charging a string of ultra-wealthy people $20 million or more for a trip to the International Space Station (ISS). That was just practice for charging NASA per seat on its Soyuz rockets, …

One of the most significant benefits of Curiosity’s work on Mars won’t actually help Curiosity at all. After years of probing the Red Planet with probes like Curiosity, Spirit, and Opportunity, we’ve gathered a great deal of information about how water once flowed across Mars. Features that once looked as …

 NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission consists of four identical spacecraft that orbit around Earth through the dynamic magnetic system surrounding the planet to study a type of space explosion called magnetic reconnection, a common event throughout the Universe that occurs when magnetic fields change by connecting and then breaking apart. …

SpaceX has already made spaceflight shorty many times, but it’s skipping today’s record-setting launch. The company had been scheduled to launch a Falcon 9 rocket carrying 64 small satellites into orbit (known as SSO-A), but that wasn’t the historic part. It would have been the third launch for this particular …

From studying rock formations from satellite images, planetary researchers know that hundreds of craters across the Martian surface were once filled with water. More than 200 of these paleolakes have outlet canyons tens to hundreds of miles long and several miles wide carved by water flowing from the lakes. A …

Scientists have long expected that we would eventually find an object in our solar system that started out orbiting another star. However, no one expected it to be so weird. The alien comet ‘Oumuamua appeared in the sky last year as it tumbled past the sun. From our limited observation …

In order to make accurate weather predictions, NOAA needs weather satellites in orbit to peer down at Earth. Until recently, the agency was making do with very old hardware from the 1990s, but it has since started launching the much improved GOES-R satellites. GOES-17 launched in March of this year, …

For most of human history, people wondered if there were other planets out there in the unfathomable reaches of space. It turns out there are some very close to Earth, though. A team of astronomers has revived interest in Barnard’s Star, which hangs in space just six light years away. …

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket does not have a spotless record. In the last few years, SpaceX has lost one vehicle on the launchpad and another broke apart en route to the International Space Station (ISS). Yet, SpaceX is on a roll as it nears three dozen successful Falcon 9 launches …

NASA’s Juno spacecraft made its 16th close science flyby of Jupiter on October 29, 2018 and captured stunning images of the gas giant. This image captured by NASA’s Juno orbiter shows a multitude of magnificent, swirling clouds in Jupiter’s North North Temperate Belt. The image was taken at 4:58 p.m. …