Space News

Some notes from the first day of the Division for Planetary Sciences meeting on Mercury.

The National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) suspended its United States operations Friday (Oct. 4) after the government shutdown forced the large astronomy organization to temporarily close its doors.

When you take a science geek to a science-fiction film, no good deed goes unpunished. Throw together a bunch of narrative nonsense linked by sheds of technobabble and the boffins will enjoy your movie as high camp (see T...

Observations by amateurs helped researchers determine that the 168-mile-wide asteroid (87) Sylvia appears to have a dense core surrounded by a layer of relatively fluffy material. Further, the space rock's larger moon is...

While 'Gravity' raked in about $55.6 million at the box office in its opening weekend, at least one real-life space scientist has a few issues with the science of the new movie.

Last week, we asked if you were looking for an observing challenge: looking for planet Uranus when it reached opposition — where it is opposite the Sun the sky, meaning the planet rises as the Sun sets. Giuseppe Petric...

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NASA's 8,000-pound Juno probe will skim just 350 miles (560 kilometers) above Earth's surface on Wednesday, getting a critical gravity assist more than two years after launching on a circuitous path to the solar system's...

An engineer suggests building a roof over a small planet so that Earthlike conditions could be maintained.

NASA's newest moon probe is officially in lunar orbit. After, a month-long journey, the space agency's Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) spacecraft performed an engine burn on Sunday (Oct. 6) that to...

The meteor shower (Halley's Comet remnants) peaks from October 20 to 23 and the penumbral Lunar eclipse occurs on Oct 18th. Find out how and where you can view them.

Twelve years on, Mars Odyssey just keeps sending great images.

For millennia, human eyes have seen only one face of the moon. Put a dude from the Iron Age in a time machine and whisk him to 2013 and he’d see the same pattern of light lunar highlands punctuated by dark grey spots y...

Three to two. That’s the ratio of the time it takes Mercury to go around the sun (88 days) in relation to its rotation (58 days). This is likely due to the influence of the Sun’s immense gravity on the planet. A new ...

"Gravity," Warner Bros.' thriller, launched to the top of the box office its debut weekend, entering the orbit of record-setting films. The movie about stranded spacewalkers took in an estimated $55.6 million and set a r...

Finding life on alien planets might be harder than scientists originally expected. The search for habitable and inhabited exoplanets is focused on M dwarf stars.

UC San Diego became the first university to design, print and test an 'additively-manufactured 'rocket engine. It was printed from Cobalt Chromium. The students were part of UCSD's chapter of Students for the Exploration...

The European Space Research And Technology Centre (ESTEC), hosted its 2013 Open Day on Oct. 6th, 2013 in Noordwijk, Netherlands. Over 8,500 people attended and had a chance to meet astronauts, see its technical labs high...

Finding Earth 2.0, in the words of noted SETI researcher Jill Tarter, is something a lot of exoplanet searchers are hoping for one day. They’re trying not to narrow down their search to Sun-like stars, but also examine...

A few weeks ago, a bunch of astronauts went underground in Italy in the name of science and better finessing the techniques of running a space mission. A movie-style “preview” of their work plays in the video above. ...

Fancy a day’s outing skimming above the moon’s surface in a private two-person spaceship? If you’re staying at a future space hotel planned by Virgin Galactic, that may be an... --

ESA Top News: Space science image of the week: sharing the excitement of the Rosetta comet-chaser at ESA's latest open day