Space Exploration

The International Space Station is currently inaccessible after the recent Soyuz launch abort. We’re still looking at the better part of a year before SpaceX or Boeing have any hope of a manned launch, so investigators are anxious to figure out what happened during last week’s incident. According to an …

NASA has been pinging the Opportunity rover for the last several months, but the plucky little robot is still sleeping after its run-in with a massive Martian dust storm. There may still be hope for the mission, too. NASA engineers say that Opportunity has one last chance to save itself …

This last week has been a rough one for space news, to say the least. The iconic Hubble Space Telescope has been placed in safe mode following a hardware failure, and a Soyuz booster failure resulted caused NASA Nick Hague and cosmonaut Aleksey Ovchinin to abort their trip to the …

A new study, published in the journal Icarus, reveals Ganymede — the largest and most massive moon of Jupiter and in the Solar System — appears to have undergone complex periods of geologic activity, specifically strike-slip tectonism, as is seen in the San Andreas Fault on Earth. Ganymede, larger than …

The Mobile Asteroid Surface Scout (MASCOT), a lander carried by JAXA’s Hayabusa-2 spacecraft, successfully completed its historic exploration of the near-Earth asteroid Ryugu on October 3, 2018, as its battery ran out. An artist’s impression of MASCOT during landing. Image credit: DLR. MASCOT was developed by the German Aerospace Center …

NASA has been without its own launch vehicle since the retirement of the Space Shuttle in 2011. Since then, the agency has been moving full-speed ahead with the Space Launch System (SLS). Well, it’s been trying. Delays and cost overruns have plagued the SLS, and a new report lays the …

Cassini’s 20-year mission culminated in a series of wild orbits. First, it grazed the outer rim of Saturn’s rings and then, in the Grand Finale phase, the spacecraft dove through the narrow gap between the gas giant and its icy rings before plunging into and disintegrating into the planet’s upper …

Saturn’s moon Titan is a fascinating celestial object, and not just because it orbits another planet. Titan has more than twice as much surface area as our moon and is one of two known objects with stable bodies of liquid on the surface — the other is Earth. Although, on …

Companies like Boeing and SpaceX may both be working with NASA to return Americans to space in rockets and crew vessels of our own design. The companies are competitors, not partners, and they’re competing for some of the most lucrative, important contracts of the 21st century. They also aren’t friends …

It has been more than a year since the iconic Cassini probe ended its mission by diving into the atmosphere of Saturn, the planet it studied for more than a decade. However, Cassini is the mission that just keeps on giving. Scientists are still analyzing the data collected by Cassini …