Space News

Cady Coleman is the real-life Sandra Bullock--sort of. Coleman is a NASA astronaut, like Bullock’s character, Ryan Stone, in the new film Gravity, out October 4. As Bullock prepared for the... --

50 million light-years away a quasar resides in the hub of galaxy NGC 4438, an incredibly bright source of light and radiation that’s the result of a supermassive black hole actively feeding on nearby gas and dust (and...

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) consists of 66 antennas and is located in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile. North America and Asia each provided 25 and East Asia gave 16. They will helps answe...

The promising Comet ISON, now less than two months away from a close encounter with the sun, is making a close approach to another member of the solar system today (Oct. 1): the planet Mars. Here's how to see Comet ISON ...

When the US Space Surveillance Network indicated they were tracking additional objects in orbit following Sunday's maiden launch of SpaceX's next generation rocket, speculation began among satellite trackers that the upp...

The NASA mission to Jupiter (Juno) will use a gravity assist from Earth to send it on its way to the Gas Giant. There will also be opportunities to see 9% more of the moon on its eastern and western limbs.

The shutdown has frozen launch preparations for NASA's Maven Mars probe, which is slated to blast off Nov. 18. Maven has until Dec. 7 to get off the ground, after which point it would have to wait 26 months for another l...

The moon came into existence after several planet-size space bodies smashed into the nascent Earth one after the other, with the final one actually forming our satellite, while several impacts repeatedly blew off our pla...

Today is NASA’s 55th birthday. Unfortunately, the celebration is muted due to the government shutdown, forcing much of NASA to shut down as well for the time being (see our overview of what’s still running at NASA an...

Ionic or plasma water may exist deep within Gliese 1214 b, a super-Earth with a water-rich atmosphere. Astronomers have determined that the atmosphere of super-Earth Gliese 1214 b is likely water-rich. However, this exop...

Launch team comments on their first West Coast SpaceX Falcon 9, which lifted the Cascade Smallsat & Ionospheric Polar Explorer [CASSIOPE] from Vandenberg Air Force Base's Space Launch Complex-4 in a crucial test of vehic...

On Sept. 6, 1962, a chunk of the Soviet Union's Sputnik IV satellite dropped into the middle of a street in Manitowoc, Wis. To this day, that event is celebrated at Sputnikfest, an annual sci-fi and art festival that its...

NASA is preparing to launch a 3-D printer into space next year, a toaster-sized game changer that greatly reduces the need for astronauts to load up with every tool, spare part or supply they might ever need. Powerd by N...

Look out, dark energy: A TARDIS may be the real reason the universe is accelerating. Regions in space-time that are bigger on the inside than the outside -- just like the sci-fi character Doctor Who's TARDIS time machine...

"Runner Up" of the "Deep Space" category in the Royal Observatory Greenwich's Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2013 exhibition, this beautiful space wallpaper shows Rho Ophiuchi and Antares Nebulae.

I spoke with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Veronica McGregor and the Applied Physics Laboratory's Geoff Brown this morning to get accurate information about the operation of NASA planetary missions. In brief: All of NA...

Leftover radiation from the Big Bang — that expansion that kick-started the universe — can be bent by huge cosmic structures, just like other light that we see in the universe. While the finding seems esoteric at fir...

The Benford brothers provide inspiration and hard fact in their excellent new anthology about interstellar travel.

In "Gravity," director Alfonso Cuarón's new movie about astronauts (Sandra Bullock and George Clooney) stranded on a spacewalk, the attention that is paid to mission patches symbolizes the level of detail that the film'...

Most NASA employees will be able to celebrate the space agency's 55th birthday from the comfort of their own homes today (Oct. 1).

A forthcoming NASA launch to Mars could be in danger of losing its launch window should a shutdown in the United States federal government that began today (Oct. 1) continue for a while. That’s just one of the ways in ...

See photos of astronauts exploring the ocean floor as a wet dress rehearsal to real-life space travel. Different ocean simulations are performed by the European Space Agency and NASA.