Space News

Skywatcher snaps amazing images of active sunspot AR 1944.

The Pleiades star cluster dazzles brilliantly in this deep-exposure, widefield photo recently sent in to SPACE.com by veteran astrophotographer Josh Knutson. See how he took the amazing photo here.

Today's Planned Tasks Orbital Launch: Orb-1 launched successfully from Pad 0A at Wallops Flight Facility at 12:07 pm CST today. This was the first flight of the Castor 30B upper stage. Ascent and separation events were a...

Earlier this week I had the very great pleasure of catching up with Lee Billings , the author of Five Billion Years of Solitude , a beautifully written and provocative new book about the quest to... --

Floating at the center of this cool space wallpaper is a lidless purple eye, staring back at us through space. This ethereal object, known officially as [SBW2007] 1 but sometimes nicknamed SBW1, is a nebula with a giant ...

Host: Fraser Cain We record the Weekly Space Hangout every Friday at 12:00 pm Pacific / 3:00 pm Eastern. You can watch us live on Google+, Universe Today, or the Universe Today YouTube page. Fraser Cain on Google+ © Fra...

Virgin Galactic launched its highest SpaceShipTwo test flight yet, a supersonic rocket-powered flight on Jan. 10 that sent the private space plane streaking 71,000 feet over California's Mojave Desert.

2014 should be the year that Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo (SS2) brings passengers on suborbital space flights, and the company started off the year by successfully completing its third rocket-powered supersonic flight ...

See photos from Virgin Galactic's third rocket-powered test flight of the private space plane SpaceShipTwo on Jan. 10, 2014. It was Virgin Galactic's highest flight at the time.

When it comes to accuracy, everyone strives for a hundred percent, but measuring cosmic distances leaves a bit more to chance. Just days ago, researchers from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) announced ...

SpaceShipTwo climbed to more than 21,000 meters and reached a top speed of Mach 1.4 during the flight.

On Saturday (Jan. 11), Venus will pass between Earth and the sun, an event scientists call an 'inferior conjunction.' The event comes as Venus is moving from an evening planet to a a brilliant 'morning star.' Here is how...

ESA governments have approved a budget of 4.1 billion euros for 2014, a 4.2 percent decline from 2013.

A pile of Chang'e 3 photos has been released to the Web, and they are much, much better than what I've seen before. They include, for the first time, photos of Earth from the lander.

The Mars Society sponsored Mars Desert Research Station [MDRS] crew answers your questions about the simulated mission in Utah.

The constellation of Earth-imaging satellites launched yesterday--28 individual sputniks, called “Doves,” each about the size of its namesake and weighing in at a svelte five... --

More than three-quarters of the planet candidates discovered by NASA's Kepler spacecraft have sizes ranging from that of Earth to that of Neptune, which is nearly four times as big as Earth. Such planets dominate the gal...

Lawmakers have renamed NASA's premiere flight research center to honor the first man to walk on the moon. Congress passed a bill designating NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center in southern California the 'NASA Neil A. A...

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden and Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana will visit the agency's Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans, La., Monday, Jan. 13.

Nicknamed the "Hand of God," this object is called a pulsar wind nebula. It's powered by the leftover, dense core of a star that blew up in a supernova explosion. The stellar corpse, called PSR B1509-58, or B1509 for sho...

JAXA astronaut Koichi Wakata takes you on a tour of the compact quarters aboard the International Space Station.

Phone booths. You know, those things that Superman used to change into his cape and tights. According to news reports, the last phone booths in use in the US will be decommissioned and hauled away sometime this year. If ...