Should Artemis IV astronauts actually land near the moon’s south pole? Artemis II pilot says the lunar equator might be better
The moon’s south pole has long been the target of NASA’s Artemis lunar landing missions, but one Artemis…
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…
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…
FCC approves launch of satellite designed to reflect sunlight back to Earth
The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approved a satellite launch on Thursday to test a reflector designed to…
Scientists think at least two of Uranus’s moons — Titania and Oberon — may harbour liquid water oceans beneath their icy crusts, kept warm not by the sun but by radioactive decay deep in their interiors. If true, they join a growing list of ocean worlds in the solar system
At nearly three billion kilometres from the Sun, the moons of Uranus receive little of the solar energy…
Crews Move Artemis IV Liquid Hydrogen Tank
Crews at NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans transport the 130-foot-tall Artemis IV liquid hydrogen tank out of…
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…
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…
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…
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…