Space Exploration

NASA’s Kepler satellite has been observing the stars for nearly a decade, and it’s produced a mountain of data in that time. Late last year, Google showed how machine learning could help astronomers dig through the Kepler backlog, and it discovered a few new exoplanets in the process. Google has …

New images and video captured by ESA’s Mars Express orbiter show two small Martian moons Phobos and Deimos drifting in front of the giant planet Saturn and background stars. This image of Phobos was acquired using the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) during Mars Express orbit 17,342 on September 12, …

Most scientific discoveries are the product of years of careful research, but sometimes science happens by accident. Such was the case for researchers at the University of Nevada who were looking for a specific form of carbon dioxide in diamonds. Instead, they detected the first ever samples of naturally occurring …

Understanding solar activity is a vital part of protecting spacecraft, but it’s difficult to know where the high-energy particles from a coronal mass ejection (CME) will go before they get there. A team of scientists has now used data from a trio of NASA satellites to develop a new model …

Humanity might not be safe even if we tackle challenges like global climate change and perpetual war. An asteroid could fall out of the sky and knock us back into the stone age, or worse, end our brief reign on this planet. NASA and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) …

The swirls and vortexes in the clouds of gas giants like Jupiter sometimes have analogs in Earth’s atmosphere, but some cloud formations are completely alien. NASA’s Juno probe has been in orbit of Jupiter since 2016, sending back fascinating images and data from the solar system’s largest planet. In the …

New data gathered by NASA’s Juno orbiter indicate that Jupiter’s winds run deep into its atmosphere and last longer than similar atmospheric processes found on Earth. The findings, published in the March 8, 2018 issue of the journal Nature, will improve understanding of Jupiter’s interior structure, core mass and, eventually, …

Jupiter has no tilt as it moves, so its poles have never been visible from our planet. But in the past two years, with NASA’s Juno spacecraft, researchers have gotten a good look at the top and bottom of the planet for the first time. What they found astounded them: …

A stupendously rare astronomical event occurred last year when Triton, Neptune’s largest moon, passed in front of a distant star. The extreme distances involved made this event almost impossible to observe, but the European Space Agency (ESA) helped astronomers pin down exactly where they needed to be to observe it. …

SpaceX has yet another Falcon 9 launch scheduled for tomorrow, and there’s something special about this one, but it’s not the payload. When this rocket lifts off, it’ll be the 50th launch of a Falcon 9 since SpaceX first sent the vehicle up in 2010. This doesn’t include the recent …