Space News

Every year, when NASA releases its White House budget request, I open the report with dread. Will it show that things are roughly the same as last year, or will there be more bad news, with slashes and cuts to vital prog...

NASA is prepared to axe an airborne telescope to keep “higher-priority” programs such as the Saturn Cassini mission going, according to budget documents the agency released today (March 4). We have more information a...

Mercury, the elusive planet that orbits closest to the sun, makes an appearance this month in the dawn sky.

Astronomers have calculated how fast a distant supermassive black hole rotates, clocking it at nearly half the speed of light. A fortuitious lineup of cosmic objects allowed scientists to measure the mind-boggling spin r...

Should SpaceX earn certification to launch U.S. national security payloads it will be eligible to bid on half as many as originally expected.

Rocky Russian relations could leave U.S. astronauts without rides to the International Space Station. For now, the U.S.-Russian space partnership is insulated from the political whirlwind generated by Russia's decision t...

(Phys.org) --Astronomers have used NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Space Agency's (ESA's) XMM-Newton to show a supermassive black hole six billion light years from Earth is spinning extremely rapidly. T...

Amateur astronomer Jeff Johnson of Las Cruces, N.M. captured this stunning view of the orange supergiant star Xi Cygni and the North American Nebula. See how he did it here.

NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center: An exhibit on NASA's James Webb Space Telescope is returning to the South by Southwest (SXSW) Gaming Expo in Austin, Texas, March 7-9, 2014.

Randy Halverson (dakotalapse.com) captured the footage from April-Nov 2013 in South Dakota, Utah and Wyoming. 2 Canon 5D Mark III and 1 Canon 6D cameras were used to create this compilation.

Asteroid 2014 DX110 was captured by Gianluca Masi of the Virtual Telescope Project (virtualtelescope.eu). Its closest approach is ~217,000 miles away from Earth on March 5th, 2014. (looped)

Tim Webber won the Oscar this week for Best Achievement in Visual Effects for his work on Gravity --

NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center: NASA successfully tested technology that would empower future space robots to transfer propellant into the tanks of satellites in space.

NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory: A quasar located about 6 billion light years from Earth.

The spin rate of a supermassive black hole has been measured for the first time, and wow, is it fast. X-ray observations of RX J1131-1231 (RX J1131 for short) show it is whizzing around at almost half the speed of light....

The half-the-speed-of-light spin of a giant black hole suggests it grew by digesting another black hole in a galaxy merger. Clara Moskowitz reports  --

The half-the-speed-of-light spin of a giant black hole suggests it grew by digesting another black hole in a galaxy merger. Clara Moskowitz reports.   --

NASA's Mars MAVEN mission (arriving 21 September 2014) will detect and measure how the solar wind interacts with the Red Planet's atmosphere, giving clues to where its water went and why.

NASA announced today that their Europa mission concept studies will be for a sub-$1 billion spacecraft, a level never before imagined for a mission to this watery moon.

The time to change clocks is once again nigh. We'll put our unabashed bias as a lover of the night sky right up front: we loathe Daylight Saving Time. And it's not just because of the biannual hunt through our home for t...

NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center: The heat from warm river waters draining into the Arctic Ocean is contributing to the melting of Arctic sea ice each summer, a new NASA study finds.

Spinning 390 times a second, the "black widow" pulsar PSR J1311'3430 periodically swings its radio (green) and gamma-ray (magenta) beams past Earth in this amazing space wallpaper.