While the concept may seem otherworldly, advancements in space technology have made such projects more conceivable.
A NASA Mars rover looked up at a moody sky. What it saw wasn't a star.
Perseverance captures a rare sight from the surface of the Red Planet. In the hours just before dawn, NASA‘s Perseverance rover adjusted its gaze toward the heavens and saw a brilliant point of light. That bright sparkle wasn’t a morning star beaming from distant space, but something more mysterious — Mars‘ shiest moon, Deimos. …
Private lunar spacecraft sends home breathtaking moon snapshot
The company is weeks away from a landing attempt. A Japanese commercial spacecraft is zeroing in on its second attempt at a lunar landing, now flying laps around the moon. The company ispace entered lunar orbit more than a week ago, sending its Resilience lander soaring about 62 miles above the surface at …
NASA just performed a 'miracle save' for its farthest spacecraft
Voyager 1 keeps on trucking. NASA engineers have brought a set of obsolete thrusters back from the dead on the Voyager 1 probe, just before losing their ability to talk to the aging spacecraft. Over a half-century, Voyager 1 has sprinted about 38,000 mph and become the farthest human-made object, crossing …
Webb discovers a distant moon has an intriguing similarity to Earth
Why scientists are thrilled by what they saw on Titan. Scientists have had a hunch that a distant moon experiences weather like Earth’s, forming clouds that douse its craggy surface with rain. If that’s the case, it would make Titan the only other world in the solar system that has that in common with our home planet. …
NASA rover captures an aurora from Mars surface for the first time
Perseverance looked up at the right moment for a light show. NASA‘s Perseverance rover has captured an aurora in the night sky for the first time from the Martian ground. Scientists have known for two decades that Mars‘ skies have auroras, too, but these curtains of undulating light had only been detected in ultraviolet — …
Watch how an old Venus spacecraft tumbled before crashing to Earth
A German radar station likely got the last look. Before a Soviet-era spacecraft intended for Venus crashed back to Earth over the weekend, German astronomers watched it tumble through space. As Kosmos 482 took its last laps, a German radar station spotted the uncrewed landing capsule passing over its antenna. The <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7327958537341476866" …
Stunning video reveals Jupiter's roiling auroras. See it now.
Scientists are puzzled by its dazzling afterglow. Astronomers have zoomed in on Jupiter‘s poles to get a better look at the gas giant planet’s auroras — 100 times brighter than the Northern Lights on Earth. These alien light shows are not only humongous compared to the ones people are used to seeing in our …
Hubble spots a roaming black hole light-years from where it belongs
A space vortex plays hide-and-seek with sky surveys. A black hole skulking in the shadows 600 million light-years away in space gave itself away with a dazzling flash, the light of a star it had just gnashed and eaten. Using NASA‘s Hubble Space Telescope and other observatories, astronomers …
NASA astronauts are proud bedwetters. They even practice.
You ain't cool unless you pee your space pants. Before NASA shot astronaut Scott Kelly into orbit for the first time in 1999, he had an important order from his commander: Take one of these diapers, and go practice at home. So there he was, wearing a government-issued space diaper, lying down in his bathtub …