Space Exploration

A team of researchers from Anglia Ruskin University and the University of Exeter, UK, has created the soundtrack of the Martian sunrise captured by NASA’s Mars rover Opportunity, using data sonification techniques to create a two-minute piece of music. Photograph of the 5,000th sunrise over Mars captured by NASA’s Opportunity …

There are thousands of known exoplanets, but we can only detect a small fraction of planets in the cosmos. Currently, the bright light of stars blots out the meager light from exoplanets, and aliens looking our way would have a similar problem. A study from MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and …

No one is traveling to or from the International Space Station (ISS) right now thanks to the recent Soyuz launch failure, but data continues to flow freely. NASA maxed out its connection recently to beam a lovely 8K ultra high-definition (UHD) video down to Earth. It’s the first 8K video …

On November 5, 2018, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe achieved its first perihelion — its first close approach to the Sun — and flew within 15 million miles (24 million km) of our star’s surface. NASA’s Parker Solar Probe approaching the Sun. Image credit: NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio. “Parker Solar Probe …

NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day has been operating for years, but something odd appeared in the feed recently. A photo entitled “Flying Saucer Crash Lands in Utah Desert” hit the internet, and it does look a bit like the traditional flying saucer UFO. There are no aliens on the …

Our first confirmed interstellar visitor was a tough nut to crack. Scientists puzzled over ‘Oumuamua when it appeared in the sky last year. The classification flipped back and forth a few times before eventually landing on “comet,” but it’s a weird comet. Now, researchers from the Harvard Smithsonian Center for …

NASA’s Juno orbiter has detected ‘wave trains’ — massive structures of moving air that appear like waves — in the atmosphere of Jupiter. Three waves can be seen in this image, which is an excerpt of a JunoCam image taken on February 2, 2017, during Juno’s fourth flyby of Jupiter. …

It’s been a rough week for NASA missions. Earlier this week we covered news that Kepler, the planet-hunting telescope that revolutionized our understanding of extrasolar planets, has finally run out of fuel. Now it’s time to say goodbye to Dawn, our first probe to examine the mysteries of Ceres and …

While the International Space Station (ISS) is a technological marvel, it has not traditionally had a lot of onboard processing capacity. That changed last year when NASA delivered a supercomputer to the station. It was only there for a test run, but now the agency plans to use it for …

NASA declares Dawn, a mission to the two largest bodies in the Solar System’s main asteroid belt, Vesta and Ceres, over after the spacecraft depletes its hydrazine fuel and stops communicating with the agency’s Deep Space Network. This artist’s concept shows NASA’s Dawn spacecraft arriving at Ceres. Image credit: NASA …