Space News

NASA's Opportunity Mars rover has reached the site where it will wait out its sixth Red Planet winter. The rover is studying rocks at the foot of Solander Point, whose north-facing slope will allow the solar-powered rove...

Being selected to (potentially) go on a mission outside of Earth orbit has to be exciting. Assuming the astronaut title, however, brings some tough career choices. "It's truly starting at square one," said Anne McClain, ...

Prior attempts to look for alien laser signals concentrated on isolated and intense bursts of light. Now scientists are focusing on repetitive but much fainter laser signals received over a longer amount of time.

NASA's eight newest astronauts, the class of 2013, hope to explore strange new worlds aboard 21st century spacecraft. Take a quick look at America's newest space travelers.

The sun unleashed a powerful storm early Tuesday morning (Aug. 20), sending a huge cloud of superheated particles rocketing toward Earth. The eruption, known as a coronal mass ejection (CME), occurred at 4:24 a.m. EDT Tu...

Free-floating rogue planets are intriguing objects. These planet-sized bodies adrift in interstellar space were predicted to exist in 1998, and since 2011 several orphan worlds have finally been detected. The leading the...

When it comes to human missions to an asteroid and Mars, NASA can't go it alone, the space agency's administrator said today (Aug. 20).

I've had black holes on the brain lately.* There's been a flurry of related research announced lately, even the discovery of black hole-like vortexes in the Atlantic Ocean, and astronomers are keenly watching as a gas cl...

Looking for a new desktop background? This might do nicely: a photo of noctilucent "night-shining" clouds seen above a midnight Sun over Alaska, taken from the ISS as it passed over the Aleutian Islands just after midnig...

Fans of Mars and spaceflight waxed poetic as the haiku selected to travel to Mars aboard the MAVEN spacecraft were announced earlier this month. The contest received 12,530 valid entries from May 1st through the contest ...

A small comet dove headlong into the sun Monday, presaging the highly anticipated close solar approach of Comet ISON a few months from now. The apparently nameless comet was captured barreling toward our star by the SOHO...

When the full moon rises tonight (Aug. 20), it will technically be a Blue Moon, but not for the reason you might think. The Blue Moon tonight is not the second full moon of August, but actually gets its name from a relat...

A baby star shines 1,400 light-years from Earth in an incredibly detailed photo taken by a brand new telescope in the Southern Hemisphere.

Herbig-Haro 46/47 is releasing two jets of materials at high speeds, causing gases around the young star to glow. Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter Array captured this glow, revealing a more energetic star t...

Navy swimmers assist the Apollo 13 crew after splashdown.

If you can't make it to Sweden to see the Northern Lights, the next best thing is a new video of the aurora lights compiled from thousands of hours of observations by videographer Chad Blakley.

Astronomers have discovered a scorching-hot "lava world" whose year lasts just 8.5 hours and determined that another planet candidate is likely composed almost entirely of iron. Both worlds were spotted by NASA's Kepler ...

Here's a rather interesting view from orbit around the innermost planet: Mercury's Tyagaraja crater, the interior of which is seen here in an oblique-angled image acquired by the MESSENGER spacecraft on November 12, 2011...

Most of the stars in the universe are main sequence stars. The sun is a main sequence star.

A general rule of skygazing is that the farther you look, the less things change. Clouds? Different from one minute to the next. Moon? Phases shifting every night. Planets? You can easily see them move over the course of...

Minutes of the May Council meeting held on 10 May 2013 at Burlington House.

Astrophotographer César Cantú from Mexico captured this beautiful view of the star Alnitak and Flame Nebula, both in the constellation Orion. Alnitak is the southern star in Orion's belt, and is an extremely hot star, ...