Space News

Curiosity has found evidence that the 96-mile-wide (154 kilometers) Gale Crater, which the rover has been studying since August 2012, hosted a large lake long ago. Runoff into this lake eventually built up Mount Sharp, m...

This is Part N of what is apparently an infinite series of "No, Asteroid XXX Is Not Going to Hit the Earth" posts. So on Oct. 24, 2014, a team of Russian astronomers found a near-Earth asteroid. Designated 2014 UR116, it...

"We should be mindful that, however they may be encoded, lifeforms are likely to have differentiated on other worlds," says Frank Rosenzweig, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Montana. "Therefore, we should...

Author Lee Billings discusses the divide among scientists in the hunt for life elsewhere in the universe, and what an alien civilization might tell us about our own future.

Orbital has contracted for one Atlas 5 launch of its Cygnus space capsule next year, with an option for a second Atlas 5 launch for 2016 "if needed."

NASA says a newly spotted 1,300-foot (400-meter) wide asteroid is not a threat to hit Earth, despite recent media reports.

Before assuming an asteroid is going to kill us all, take a deep breath and open up the NASA’s Near Earth Object (NEO) program website to check your information, the agency suggests in a statement regarding a so-called...

Claims that scientists have discovered a huge asteroid that could threaten Earth aren't correct, according to NASA.

In a section from his book 'Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars,' Lee Billings discusses how the need for energy is tied to the search for intelligent life in the universe.

In astronomy, bigger is almost always better. The size of a telescope’s aperture (or primary optical element) not only determines how many pesky little photons it can capture, but also the... --

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory News and Features: You may know opals as fiery gemstones, but something special called OPALS is floating above us in space.

Cast your gaze up, up, up on the next dark, moonless night and stare into the Great Square of Pegasus. How many stars do you see? Zero? Two? Twenty? If you’d like to find out how dark your sky is,

Asteroid 2014 UR116, spotted by astronomers in Kislovodsk, Russia, turns out to have been observed 6 years ago. NASA's JPL combined the data to show the asteroid passes no closer than 29x the distance to the moon in 2017...

Not long ago I came across a piece in the Scientific American archives from the earliest days of very-long baseline radio interferometry, the technique employed by the Event Horizon Telescope. --

Scientists from Leiden University have shown in the laboratory how Buckyballs - molecular soccerballs - form in space. The experiments are special, as these are based on a new chemical concept - top-down, from big to sma...

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory News and Features: An innovative robot developed at JPL will perform several disaster-relief tasks in next year's DARPA Robotics Challenge finals.

The board of directors of SIA has appointed telecommunications industry veteran Tom Stroup to serve as the advocacy group's president.

Stars form in interstellar clouds of molecular gas and dust....

Scientists from Leiden University have shown in the laboratory how Buckyballs -- molecular soccer balls -- form in space....

ESA's fifth and last Automated Transfer Vehicle tested a new technique before docking with the International Space Station in August, at the same time revealing the orbital complex in a new light....

Sonar image above shows methane bubbles rising from the seafloor off the Washington coast. The base of the column is 1/3 of a mile (515 meters) deep and the top of the plume is at 1/10 of a mile (180...

See stunning photos of the night sky and sun as seen by stargazers around the world in this Space.com photo gallery for December 2014 made up of images sent in by Space.com readers.