A Powerful Cosmic Accelerator Has Been Confirmed in the Milky Way
NASA’s Fermi telescope detected GeV gamma rays from LHAASO J1912+1014u, helping confirm it as a proton PeVatron. The…
Should Scientists Have Research “Reserves” on the Moon?
The worlds of the Solar System offer up exciting and (so far) mostly pristine places for planetary scientists…
Jupiter’s moon Io is the most volcanically active body in the solar system, with hundreds of active volcanoes that can shoot sulphur plumes more than 500 kilometres above its surface — a landscape so extreme that early Voyager scientists initially mistook the plume images for camera errors
When Voyager 1 flew past Jupiter in March 1979, scientists expected its moon Io to be cold, battered…
Later this decade NASA plans to launch Dragonfly, a car-sized nuclear-powered drone that will fly from site to site across Saturn’s moon Titan
Picture a car-sized machine sitting on an orange, frozen plain. It powers up eight rotors, rises into a…
Skylab cost roughly $2.2 billion, hosted nine astronauts across three missions and remained in orbit for just over six years — before breaking apart over Western Australia, where its remains became museum exhibits, Lucite-encased souvenirs and, according to local accounts, even a cattle trough.
Skylab began as one of the most ambitious machines the United States had ever placed in orbit and…
Vulcan Centaur swapped out again: NASA goes with SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket for launch of space weather mission
NASA is shaking things up for its next mission to research the sun. The six satellites of NASA’s…
NASA’s Perseverance rover finds the strongest evidence yet of ancient life on Mars
The surface of Mars is no place for anything fragile. Radiation pours down, and the ground’s chemistry tears…
The computers guiding Voyager 1 through interstellar space process roughly 8,000 instructions per second; a modern smartphone processes more than 14 billion — yet that 1970s machine has operated for nearly half a century, farther from Earth than any spacecraft in history.
Voyager 1 is controlled by computers whose performance belongs to another technological era. A frequently repeated comparison puts…
Astronomers fix a key error in measuring the Sun’s silver
Researchers have recalculated how much silver the Sun holds, and the answer is about 55 percent higher than…
How to safely watch the August 2026 solar eclipse in Portugal
The Portuguese Society of Ophthalmology is urging anyone planning to watch the eclipse to use only certified solar…
Chondritic meteorites may be the remains of escaped moons
The chondritic meteorites that land on Earth most often are the shattered remains of tiny moons that once…
NASA’s MAVEN Illuminates New Understanding of Auroras at Mars
NASA MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution) mission scientists have uncovered a key puzzle piece in understanding certain…