Space News

Years ago I had an opportunity to visit the historic Grucci fireworks factory on Long Island. Artisan chemists there were hard at work crafting reactions that would detonate with just the right color and just the right s...

NASA finalizes contract with Boeing for first stage of Space Launch System. First test flight of gargantuan booster set for 2017.

Astronomers investigating behaviour of the universe shortly after the Big Bang have made a surprising discovery: the properties of the early universe are determined by the smallest galaxies. The team report their finding...

NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 mission is underway. Launched from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base, OCO-2 will help track our impact on the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and help us better unders...

Highlights of recent research conducted on the International Space Station....

NASA's Space to Ground is your weekly update on what's happening aboard the International Space Station....

Hurricane Arthur is currently slamming the east coast of the United States. Having lived through a number of such tempestuous events, I hope everyone affected is staying safe. If you've never been in one, the sheer viole...

This image from the Sentinel-1A radar satellite on 6 June shows part of the Philippine island of Luzon with Mount Pinatubo....

When a massive star dies, it can collapse under its own gravity with such force that it produces a supernova, leaving behind an extremely dense remnant consisting almost entirely of neutrons--a neutron star. Some neutron...

The west-central Africa fire season was underway, and widespread as biomass burning (red dots) appears in this true-color Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) image from the Aqua satellite captured on Ja...

Two potentially habitable planets in the Gliese 581 system are just false signals arising out of starstuff, a new study said. Gliese 581d and 581g are (study authors said) instead indications of the star’s activity and...

While Fourth of July festivities tonight may bring brilliant colors blazing across the night sky, only 23 million light-years away is another immense cosmic display, complete with a supermassive black hole, shock waves, ...

Our week through the lens: 30 June - 04 July 2014

The moon and Mars will rendezvous in the night sky Saturday, putting on a spectacular show. Some skywatchers will even see the moon blot out the Red Planet in an event known as an occultation.

Theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, one of the creators of loop quantum gravity, and his collaborator Hal Haggard have just come out with a new paper on black holes. --

Rosetta's scientific imaging system OSIRIS is slowly but surely resolving comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in its narrow angle camera (NAC), giving the first tantalising hints of its shape.

Today is the Fourth of July, Independence Day in the States. By a charming coincidence, an image was released today of a comet passing the Earth, and it happens to be red, white, and blue! That is comet C/2012 K1 (Pan-ST...

Life as we know it on Earth is linked to our star, the Sun, which provides our planet with just the right amount of heat and energy for liquid water to be stable in our lakes, rivers and oceans. However, as the Sun ages,...

ASI Agenzia Spaziale Italiana: The 65th International Astronautical Congress will take place in Toronto, Canada, from 29 September to 3 October 2014 at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre."Our World Needs Space" will be ...

(Phys.org) --NASA's NEOWISE mission captured a series of pictures of comet C/2012 K1--also known as comet Pan-STARRS--as it swept across our skies in May 2014.

The dramatic conclusion to ESA's latest StarTiger project: a 'dropship' quadcopter steers itself to lower a rover gently onto a safe patch of the rocky martian surface.

ASI Agenzia Spaziale Italiana: Exactly two years remaining to the lift-off of the most ambitious mission to date scheduled by the ESA in interplanetary exploration: Bepi Colombo, so named in honour of the Italian mathema...