Space Exploration

It’s not every day that a robot sends back footage from the surface of an asteroid, but today is such a day. The Japanese Hayabusa mission successfully deployed several small robots last week, and now we’ve gotten a batch of images and video from the little drum-shaped drones. This is …

Manned space missions have been confined to low-Earth orbit for decades, but NASA is looking to change that. After speaking in general terms about a return to the moon and missions to Mars, the agency has released a timeline of objectives to get us there. It starts with expanding commercial …

Last year, astronomers spotted an object from beyond the stars. There have surely been many interstellar visitors to our humble solar system over the eons, but this is the first one we’ve been able to study as it passed through. ‘Oumuamua is a slender, cigar-shaped comet that could have come …

A Japanese startup called Ispace is shooting for the moon, and SpaceX is going to help. The company wants to lead the charge in the search for large water ice deposits on the lunar surface, and it has two missions planned to make it happen. Both missions, currently slated for …

The Opportunity rover is still taking an extended nap on Mars, but NASA has caught sight of the little robot. With the aid of the HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), NASA has pinpointed Opportunity’s location on the slopes of Perseverance Valley. Knowing where the rover ended up …

SpaceX is moving full-speed ahead with the Big Falcon Rocket (BFR) project with the aim of sending a Japanese fashion tycoon on a moon mission in 2023. That’s not the only thing CEO Elon Musk has planned for the BFR. In his characteristically off-handed way, Musk noted on Twitter that …

One of Japan’s most ambitious space missions just reached an important milestone. The Hayabusa2 probe has successfully deployed a pair of tiny robots destined to explore the surface of the asteroid Ryugu. These robots are just the first of many instruments Hayabusa2 will drop off on the surface, but the …

The Royal Astronomical Society has reported the first-ever detection of matter falling directly into a black hole at 30 percent of the speed of light, courtesy of a super-massive black hole located in the galaxy PG211+143. The finding tells us something about how gas is sucked into the gullet of …

In the last few decades, we’ve gone from knowing of exactly zero exoplanets to several thousand. That’s largely thanks to the Kepler Space Telescope, but that mission is nearing its end. Luckily, NASA launched a successor several months ago. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) only started operating over the …

  In the Star Trek universe, the beloved character Spock hails from the planet Vulcan. This planet is, of course, entirely fictional. However, Star Trek producers eventually associated Vulcan with a real star near Earth called 40 Eridani A. New observations have revealed a planet in orbit of 40 Eridani …