Space News

The moon has a distinctive smell. Ask any Apollo moonwalker about the odiferous nature of the lunar dirt and you'll get the same answer. The moon smells like gunpowder.

A rocket with a payload that included an experimental Army strike weapon exploded after taking off from an Alaska launch pad.

NASA is developing a band of autonomous robots called "swarmies" that use radio waves to communicate with each other and may one day be used to explore the moon or Mars.

NASA engineers recently went on an auricle ride as a scale model of the Space Launch System (SLS), including solid rocket motors, was fired--giving an "earful" of information about how low- and high-frequency sound waves...

(Phys.org) --Evaluation of a pale, flat Martian rock as the potential next drilling target for NASA's Curiosity Mars rover determined that the rock was not stable enough for safe drilling.

Data from instruments aboard a NASA sounding rocket corroborates the claim that about 10 million years ago a cluster of supernova explosions blew a bubble in the interstellar medium. Today Earth resides in that bubble.

Today marks not one but two milestones in planetary exploration. It is the 25th anniversary of Voyager 2's flight past Neptune, the most distant planet ever seen up close. It is also the exact day that the New Horizons s...

Our managing editor challenges Alan Boyle from NBCNews, Discovery News' Ian O'Neil and former NASA astronaut Mike Massimino. Learn more about the challenge to fight Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), as known as Lou Ge...

The 'Top 5' landing site candidates have been chosen for the Rosetta orbiters piggybacked Philae lander for humankind's first attempt to land on a comet. See graphics above and below. The potential touchdown sites were a...

Unoccupied Russian Orlan spacesuits for Russian cosmonauts....

The early morning test of the Advanced Hypersonic Weapon was terminated for safety reasons.

New Horizons -- which is scheduled to zoom through the Pluto system on July 14, 2015 -- passed Neptune's orbit today, 25 years to the day after NASA's Voyager 2 probe executed the first-ever flyby of faraway Neptune and ...

Expedition 40 astronaut Alexander Gerst said "We flew right through a massive aurora after last week's solar mass ejection." The space station maintains a altitude of between 205 and 270 miles above Earth.

NASA calls it a cosmic coincidence.

The board, which will coordinate its activities with the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, is scheduled to begin its work Aug. 28 and to report initial findings by Sept. 8.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory News and Features: Members of the Voyager team reflect on the mission's Neptune encounter, 25 years later.

Seeking out science and astronomy in South Carolina? You're in luck, as we're pleased to report the South Carolina State Museum's brand-spanking new planetarium and astronomical observatory opened to the public earlier t...

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory News and Features: NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has crossed the orbit of Neptune, as it prepares to rendezvous with Pluto less than a year from now.

One global marketer took to space to find a way to be leaner and greener back on Earth. For Procter & Gamble (P&G), product innovation and improvement relied on use of the International Space Station (ISS) as a science p...

After 17 years of faithful service, the end is in sight for the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM). The joint NASA-Japanese mission is out of fuel (except for a small reserve amount for emergencies) and beginning...

ESA's Rosetta mission will attempt to land its Philae lander in November 2014 on the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Measurements of surface temperature, mass and gravity from the probe weighed into the decis...

While this solar peak has been weaker than usual, from time to time we get a moderate punch from the Sun. Here’s an example — what NASA calls a “mid-level” solar flare blasting off the Sun at 8:16 a.m. EDT (1:16 ...