Space Exploration

It can be depressing that all the remarkable exoplanets scientists keep discovering are so mind-bogglingly far away. We obviously can’t visit them, but they’re also more difficult to study at such great distances. Proxima Centauri b offered a ray of hope when it was confirmed in orbit of our nearest …

Hubble may be old, but it can still survey incredibly distant objects in the universe. NASA is even undertaking a project to augment Hubble’s eyesight with the aid of some “natural telescopes” in deep space. Researchers hope that these new observations will tell us more about the structure of the …

SpaceX started talking about a crewed moon mission last year, and as usual, it claimed a very ambitious timeline. The original 2018 launch ended up delayed as it took longer than expected to get the Falcon Heavy ready for flight. Now, SpaceX says its first orbital moon mission is back …

The discovery of a small, 2mm drill hole in the Soyuz capsule attached to the International Space Station in late August sent a shock wave through both NASA and Roscosmos. The hole, which appears to have been drilled from inside the capsule, is roughly 2mm in diameter. While it never …

The technology to reach another planet or moon is only worth so much if you can’t land on it. Every landing has its own challenges, but celestial bodies with an atmosphere are particularly vexing. For decades, the heat shields that protect spacecraft during atmospheric entry have been rigid and heavy, …

There are a great many mysteries still to unravel in the cosmos, and we may be one step closer to solving one of them thanks to machine learning. Scientists from the University of California, Berkeley SETI Research Center have turned an AI loose on fast radio burst (FRB) data from …

Scientists have incredibly powerful telescopes at their disposal today like Hubble and the Very Large Telescope in Chile. Even more powerful instruments like the James Webb Space Telescope and Extremely Large Telescope are coming down the pike. However, observations will only get you so far. To understand how the universe …

Astronauts scrambled last week to find and patch a small hole in the International Space Station (ISS) that threatened to leak the station’s atmosphere into space. The crew eventually discovered a tiny puncture in the Russian Soyuz capsule docked to the station. The hole was first identified as a micrometeoroid …

There was no doubt Pluto was a planet back when Clyde Tombaugh spotted it in 1930, but scientists rethought that after learning more about the solar system. In 2006, a new definition of what makes a plane from the International Astronomical Union (IAU) saw Pluto demoted to dwarf planet status. …

The dust storm on Mars is over, but Opportunity has yet to wake back up. Earlier this summer, the rover was forced into hibernation mode by an extreme Martian dust storm that darkened the skies of the Red Planet to a level we’ve literally never seen before. Most of the …