Space News

Computer modeling by NASA scientists shows that friction could be the key to survival for some distant Earth-sized planets traveling in dangerous orbits. The findings are consistent with observations that Earth-sized pla...

In a live webcast, The Planetary Society CEO Bill Nye announced that its long-awaited LightSail solar sail mission will launch to Earth orbit on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy, currently scheduled for an April 2016 liftoff. Light...

The curly string is about 100,000 light-years long and sports blue "pearls" -- actually huge young star clusters -- every 3,000 light-years along the way, researchers said. You can zoom in on the beautiful structure, and...

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory News and Features: From hopping/tumbling robots to gecko-inspired adhesives, various technologies, including four from JPL, have been chosen by NASA for suborbital flight.

Eumetsat and the European Commission 8 said they expected to reach agreement on financing a long-delayed U.S-French ocean-altimetry satellite by October.

Meet the seven new dwarf galaxies. Yale University astronomers, using a new type of telescope made by stitching together telephoto lenses, recently discovered seven celestial surprises while probing a nearby spiral galax...

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory News and Features: Repeated observations by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter indicate the surface gullies are mainly formed by seasonal freezing of carbon dioxide, not liquid water.

NASA has now released a breathtaking high resolution image of the rover Curiosity captured from Mars orbit coincidentally coinciding with her crossing the targeted landing ellipse just days after she marked '1 Martian Ye...

"Parent satellite" Prox-1 will watch its offspring, LightSail-1, as it deploys 32 sq. meters of Kapton polymide fabric in an act of cosmic origami in reverse.

The Planetary Society's citizen-funded mission, LightSail-1, will launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy in 2016. It will test solar sails to propel low-cost "cube-sats," with technology that could open highways to the planets.

Defining what makes a star "Sun-like" is as difficult as defining what makes a planet "Earth-like." A solar twin should have a temperature, mass, and spectral type similar to our Sun....

Like "beads on a string" star formation can be compared to droplets of rain New imagery from the Hubble Space Telescope merging elliptical galaxies reveals 19 compact clumps of young stars making up the string.

Satellites, Girl Scouts and good ole Charlie Brown highlight Orbital Sciences Corporation's second commercial resupply voyage to the International Space Station. The mission, Orbital-2, will both deliver new scientific i...

Re-creating conditions on the sun’s surface inside a laboratory plasma chamber, scientists find surprising insights into solar outbursts --

Re-creating conditions on the sun’s surface inside a laboratory plasma chamber, scientists find surprising insights into solar outbursts --

Today: Burning and Suppression of Solids (BASS)-II Operations: FE-5 Wiseman conducted seven flame tests for the BASS-II investigation. Six of the samples were fabric and the seventh was an acrylic, spherical material....

The mission is now expected to cost ESA about 1.2 billion euros.

NASA Breaking News: NASA Television will air a panel discussion of leading science and engineering experts on Monday, July 14, from 2 to 3:30 p.m. EDT, who will describe the scientific and technological roadmap that will...

ISEE-3 will not be returning home after all. Authors of a plan to revive the forgotten NASA satellite and return it to Earth orbit conceded Wednesday that a failure in the spacecraft's propulsion system has made it impos...

NASA Television will air a panel discussion of leading science and engineering experts on Monday, July 14, from 2 to 3:30 p.m. EDT, who will describe the scientific and technological roadmap that will lead to the discove...

Repeated high-resolution observations made by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) indicate the gullies on Mars' surface are primarily formed by the seasonal freezing of carbon dioxide, not liquid water.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has photographed an unusual structure 100,000 light years long, which resembles a corkscrew-shaped string of pearls and winds around the cores of two colliding galaxies.