Tag Archives: space

Friends, countrymen, space nerds — lend me your ears! For we come not to retweet space news, but to enjoy it. This week we’ll hear about a surprise collision at the James Webb Space Telescope. We’ll also hear about less-surprising threats from Russian space agency Roscosmos. (They’re not even threatening …

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is on the verge of beginning its science operations, so the recent news that it has suffered a micrometeoroid impact is concerning. The space observatory is the long-awaited successor to Hubble, and it could serve as our window to the wider universe for the …

Until a few decades ago, no human being had ever been away from gravity’s loving embrace. As the era of space exploration dawns, it’s still unclear how long stretches without gravity will affect the body. A new analysis of astronauts from Oregon Health & Science University shows that their brains …

  Hello and welcome to This Week in Space, our weekly roundup of all the space news that’s fit to print — or at least, distract you from doomscrolling. First off, May the Fourth be with you: this week we marked Star Wars Day, a nerd-culture staple. Any reason to …

When we talk about astronomers spotting something in the far-off corners of the cosmos, it’s usually a galaxy, a star, or some other celestial object. Not this time. A team from South Africa has discovered an ultra-powerful radio-wave laser, a phenomenon known as a megamaser. At more than five billion …

Given the number of exploding rocket videos on the internet, it should come as no surprise that getting to space is hard. It takes a lot of energy to break free of Earth’s gravity, and that currently means strapping our precious cargo to what is essentially a tube full of …

The James Webb Space Telescope finally headed into space late last year following years of delays, but everything since then has gone as well as possible. NASA has spent the last several months deploying and calibrating the telescope, and it just hit a major milestone with the completion of “fine …

We know the James Webb Space Telescope works because NASA told us it did, but now you don’t have to take the agency’s word for it. NASA has released the telescope’s first images, although they’re still just from the calibration process. It’ll be a few months before Webb is ready …

Human space exploration has been limited to low-Earth orbit for decades, but that period of stagnation is coming to an end. NASA aims to return humans to the moon in the coming decade, and the goal is to set up a long-term presence there to help with future missions to …

Move over, James Webb: humanity is about to get another eye in the sky. There’s just been a new space telescope announced, named TOLIMAN, and it’s already got funding from the Breakthrough project. The telescope is designed around two things: its target, and the exotic optics the telescope will use. …