Space Exploration

NASA has confirmed its upcoming Mars 2020 rover will carry a small robotic passenger. The agency has been working on a helicopter drone for use on Mars, and it now plans to include this vehicle with the 2020 rover. The still-unnamed Mars helicopter will be the first heavier-than-air craft to …

A new analysis of data collected by NASA’s Galileo spacecraft in 1997 has found strong evidence that the underground ocean of Jupiter’s moon Europa may be venting plumes of water vapor above the icy shell. The results appear in the journal Nature Astronomy. Artist’s illustration of Jupiter and Europa with …

The Mars Helicopter, a technology demonstration that will travel to the Red Planet with NASA’s Mars 2020 rover, will attempt controlled flight in the thin Martian atmosphere. NASA’s Mars Helicopter. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech. “Exploring the Red Planet with NASA’s Mars Helicopter exemplifies a successful marriage of science and …

SpaceX is preparing to launch the final planned iteration of its Falcon 9 rocket. If the Block 5 launch and recovery are successful (the launch is currently scheduled for today, May 11), it’ll be a huge step forward for Musk’s reusable rockets — and clear the launch pad for later …

One of the enduring puzzles in astrobiology is why we haven’t found any aliens yet — and it’s worth another look, in light of Breakthrough Listen’s latest (and unprecedented) effort to find some in a new survey of millions of stars in our galaxy. Astronomers estimate there are between 200 …

Earth is surrounded by a protective magnetic environment, the magnetosphere, which deflects a supersonic stream of charged particles from the Sun, known as the solar wind. As the particles flow around the Earth’s magnetosphere, it forms a highly turbulent boundary layer called the magnetosheath. In a new discovery, reported in …

A research team led by Rutgers University’s Professor Dennis Kent has documented a gradual shift in Earth’s orbit that repeats regularly every 405,000 years, playing a role in natural climate swings. Astrophysicists have long hypothesized that the cycle exists, but Professor Kent and co-authors have found the first verifiable physical …

The moon as it exists today is as desolate as planetoids come. It’s airless, geologically inert, and there’s no magnetic field. However, we know from the study of moon rocks brought back by the Apollo missions that the moon did once have a magnetic field. Scientists haven’t known why before, …

NASA’s Mars InSight mission successfully launched today at 7:05 a.m. EDT (4:05 a.m. PDT) from Space Launch Complex 3 at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, aboard a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V 401 rocket. InSight stands for the Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport. It is …

We lost one of our greatest scientific minds when the renowned physicist Stephen Hawking passed away several weeks ago. However, he did leave one last idea for the scientific community to mull over in his absence. Just 10 days before his death, Hawking and his colleague Thomas Hertog submitted a …