Space Exploration

By all rights, NASA’s Kepler spacecraft should have stopped working long ago. The observatory launched in 2009 with the aim of finding out how common exoplanets are throughout the universe. It turns out: very common. Mechanical failures forced NASA to change Kepler’s mission profile, but it still kept working until …

There’s substantial evidence that Earth’s ice caps are shrinking, but we often lack the instruments to track the changes in detail. NASA launched a satellite in 2003 to measure surface ice, but that mission ended in 2010. In September, NASA will launch a follow-up satellite called the Ice, Cloud, and …

After nearly two decades of design and testing, the European Space Agency (ESA) has successfully launched the Aeolus satellite. Aboard the satellite is a laser that will measure wind speeds across the globe. Aeolus could vastly increase the data scientists have on wind speeds, improving weather forecasting and providing new …

The ethereal green glow of the northern lights is a well-understood phenomenon, but that doesn’t make it any less lovely. A different atmospheric light show is still puzzling scientists. It is currently known as the Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement or STEVE for short. Amateur photographers have caught hints of …

SpaceX swears that it’s done with all the delays, and it will be ready to fly a crewed mission to the International Space Station (ISS) in April of next year. Until now, it wasn’t clear how the day’s events would go. NASA has selected the crewmen for the mission but …

Future human exploration and habitation on the moon rely on the presence of water hiding out in shadowy craters on the lunar surface. Past missions have provided good evidence that there’s water ice in there, but now we have absolute confirmation that ice exists on the surface thanks to India’s …

Researchers presenting at the Goldschmidt conference in Boston are arguing that the number of planets with significant amounts of water in their atmospheres or crusts may be much higher than previously thought. If true, this could have negative implications for our search for life elsewhere in our galaxy. That might …

Early in Hubble’s mission, it scanned a patch of sky for 10 days to collect 342 separate images. When assembled, they became the now-famous Hubble Deep Field. NASA has updated this iconic image over the years as the telescope became more powerful, and it’s doing so again. Hubble may be …

When the universe was young, there were no stars, galaxies, or even atoms. As space expanded, hydrogen atoms formed and coalesced into stars. Eventually, the first galaxies emerged, and some of those galaxies may still exist. New data from researchers at Durham University in the UK and Harvard in the …

Astronomers are accustomed to seeing supermassive black holes at the heart of large galaxies like our own Milky Way and neighboring galaxies like Andromeda. However, a new analysis suggests there’s a giant black hole hiding in a most unusual place: inside one of the smallest galaxies known to exist. Fornax …