India’s new entrant into orbit around Mars, the Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM), is a triumph for its space agency and represents the fourth country to successfully send a spacecraft to the red planet. At a reported cost of $73 million, ...
Headline-grabbing observations of primordial gravity waves now face cloudy prospects, suggests a newly released satellite map of cosmic dust. In March, the South Pole-based BICEP2 physics team reported seeing the surprisingly strong signature of gravitational waves in maps of the ...
The science of shooting stars owes much to a storied episode of crowdsourcing, a new historical report shows, kicked off by a stunning 1833 meteor shower. Astronomers have increasingly turned to “citizen science” in the Internet era, setting up everyday ...
Living off the land looks like the key to survival on Mars, so NASA’s next red planet rover will help show the way by brewing up its own oxygen, the space agency announced Thursday. The oxygen brewing effort is ...
Erupting from fractures, 101 geysers dot the surface of Saturn’s frozen moon, Enceladus, report NASA scientists. First spotted as plumes in 2005, the total number of geysers has been revealed by a long series of overflights by NASA’s Cassini ...
Even in space, astronauts can’t escape troubles on Earth. International Space Station crew member Alexander Gerst tweeted an image of “explosions and rockets” flying over Gaza and Israel on Wednesday night, which was retweeted and liked tens of thousands ...
Name that planet! Even astronomers have grown weary of planet discoveries with names that only a robot could remember, and on Wednesday they unveiled a new worldwide alien planet naming contest. Announced by the International Astronomical Union (IAU), the NameExoWorlds ...
A carbon-dioxide-monitoring satellite successfully reached orbit on Wednesday morning, NASA officials announced, replacing one lost after a failed launch five years ago. The $475 million Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) mission will map carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, watching the ...
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope will begin searching for an icy world beyond Pluto that could use some exploring, the space agency announced Monday. The goal: finding a place for the fast-moving New Horizons spacecraft to explore after it visits ...
Asteroids zip by Earth all the time, but not many make as big an impression as “The Beast,” which caromed past our astronomical neighborhood about a week ago. Now, radar observations released by NASA reveal the hidden looks of asteroid ...
NASA’s Hubble space telescope has unveiled its most colorful window into the universe yet, a glimpse of some 10,000 galaxies spread across space. Some of those universes date to the era of the first galaxies. The Hubble Ultra Deep Field (...
Say “cheese!” NASA has unveiled a global selfie, a stunning mosaic of the planet Earth seen from outer space that was stitched together from tens of thousands of self-portraits taken by people from around the world. The Earth images were ...
On the hunt for alien worlds, NASA has approved a new mission for the Kepler spacecraft, despite a crippling breakdown in 2013 that seemed to mark the end of its work forever. (See: “New Role for Disabled Kepler?”) Launched in 2009, the ...
Everyone loves cartoons, even cosmologists. They just call them simulations. Now, one of the great triumphs of modern cosmology—our understanding of how the universe evolved its kaleidoscope of stars, worlds, and galaxies—has been visualized in its first realistic ...
The jumbo jet that first carried a space shuttle coast to coast will land in a museum next month, scheduled to forever bear a copy of its most famous passenger. NASA 905 was the first of two Boeing 747 passenger jets modified ...