Space News

ESA Top News: ESA's SMOS satellite has clocked up more than one billion kilometers orbiting Earth to improve our understanding of our planet's water cycle. Marking its fifth birthday, all the data collected over land and...

The mystery about a thin, bizarre object in the center of the Milky Way headed toward our galaxy's enormous black hole has been solved by UCLA astronomers using the W. M. Keck Observatory, home of the two largest telesco...

Investigators say Virgin Galactic's experimental spaceship broke apart in flight over California's Mojave Desert after a device to slow the craft's descent prematurely deployed.

When Galileo first observed Venus displaying a crescent phase, he excitedly wrote to Kepler (in anagram) of Venus mimicking the moon-goddess. He would have been delirious with joy to see Saturn and Titan, seen in this im...

An object at rest stays at rest, and object in motion tends to stay in motion. This is inertia, defined famously by Isaac Newton in his First Law of Motion. (...)Read the rest of Astronomy Cast Ep. 356: Inertia (46 words...

Far away from any sunspot, a bright flare erupted on Nov. 1st, 2014, causing a C-class flare when some of its superheated plasma dropped back onto the Sun's surface.

When orbiting Saturn, be sure to watch for breathtaking superpositions of moons and rings. One such spectacular vista was visible to the robot Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn. In April 2006, Cassini captured Saturn's ...

On Friday, Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo broke apart during a test flight, killing co-pilot Michael Alsbury and injuring pilot Peter Siebold. On Sunday, the National Transportation Safety Board held a press conference w...

Intelsat said its business with the U.S. government, which the company had forecast would be down 15-20 percent in 2014, is proving to be just as bad as expected.

After two high-profile commercial space accidents in less than a week, advocates of private space ventures said they were still confident about the future of the overall industry.

(Phys.org) --For years, astronomers have been puzzled by a bizarre object in the center of the Milky Way that was believed to be a hydrogen gas cloud headed toward our galaxy's enormous black hole.

Glaciers and mountains in the evening sun are seen on an Operation IceBridge research flight, returning from West Antarctica on Oct. 29, 2014....

To catch individual laser photons that have travelled more than 600 miles from a satellite to Earth and back, the satellite's telescope needs to be perfectly positioned. Last week, engineers and technicians at NASA's God...

Virgin Galactic's first SpaceShipTwo spacecraft broke apart in mid-flight on Oct. 31, 2014, killing one pilot and injuring another. See the sequence of events (as known so far) related by the NTSB.

The friends and co-workers of the co-pilot who died in Virgin Galactic's tragic SpaceShipTwo accident Friday (Oct. 31) have raised more than $55,000 for his family via crowdfunding.

A prematurely deployed slowing device could "well be" behind the Virgin Galactic spaceship crash, Virgin's boss Richard Branson said Monday while hitting out at "hurtful" critics and "self-proclaimed experts."

The cause of the deadly crash of Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo on Friday remains unknown, but the commercial spaceplane's feathered reentry system looks to have been involved. --

Over 500GB of photos, taken from Oct. 26th-30th, 2014, have been compiled by Chad Blakley (lightsoverlapland.com) to deliver a "near real-time" experience to people who were unable to experience it live.

Usually, videos that feature aurora are timelapse videos, in order to show the normally slow movements of the Northern and Southern Lights. But here are some incredibly fast-moving aurorae shown in real time, as seen by ...

Cameras aboard the International Space Station captured the sprawling, chalk-white body of Hurricane Vance, which is gaining strength in the Pacific Ocean, and heading toward Mexico's west coast.

It was only in the last few years that we could fully grasp how many other planets there might be beyond our solar system. Some 64 million miles (104 kilometers) from Earth, the Kepler Space Telescope stared at a small.....

NASA has awarded the Program Analysis and Control (PAAC IV) contract to ASRC Federal InuTeq of Beltsville, Maryland.