Space Exploration

A power hiccup on Earth is probably little more than an annoyance, but it could be deadly during a theoretical deep space or Mars mission. NASA is looking into ways to power life support and scientific instruments reliably during future manned spaceflights, and small-scale nuclear reactors are at the top …

Using data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, a team of planetary researchers led by Cornell University has produced a new global topographic map of Titan, the largest moon of Saturn. Top: stereographic polar projections of Titan’s topography with the South Pole left and the North Pole right; Ontario Lacus and the …

NASA’s long-running James Webb Space Telescope project is nearing completion, but it needs a lot of testing before the agency sends it up into space where any undetected issues could prove disastrous. Several months ago, the completed telescope optical hardware was loaded into a vacuum chamber and cooled to extremely …

NASA engineers have successfully demonstrated X-ray navigation in space — a capability that could revolutionize NASA’s ability in the future to pilot robotic spacecraft to the far reaches of our Solar System and beyond. This illustration shows NASA’s NICER mission at work aboard the International Space Station. Image credit: NASA’s …

In a paper published in the journal Physical Review E, a duo of fluid dynamics experts proposes a solution to one of long-standing Martian mysteries. The research shows that wind vortices can produce the common Martian phenomenon of a stratified mound positioned downwind from the center of an ancient meteorite …

Astronomers have been puzzling over so-called fast radio bursts for several years now, but their unpredictable nature has hampered our attempts to understand this bizarre phenomenon. That’s why an object called FRB 121102 has been of such interest. Whatever this object is, it fires off fast radio bursts repeatedly. A …

We’ve known for years that there is at least some water ice on Mars, but it’s been hard to pin down where it is and how easy it would be to extract. New data from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter indicates there could be a lot of it in giant sheets …

New images from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter reveal never-before-observed details about Martian ice sheets, including that some begin just a few feet below Mars’ surface and extend to depths greater than 300 feet (100 m). The findings are published in the …

The X Prize Foundation exists to encourage the development of breakthrough technologies, and a few years ago it partnered with Google to fund a big one. The Google Lunar X Prize challenges companies to send a robotic rover to the moon. The foundation is ready to pay up to $30 …

A team of researchers from the United States, UK and Japan has found liquid water and a mix of complex organic compounds in 4.5-billion-year-old salt crystals preserved in two unique meteorites, Zag and Monahans, which separately crashed to Earth in 1998. Zag/Monahans meteorites and their salt (halite) crystals: (A) diagram …