Space News

A video released last week by the private spaceflight company Blue Origin featuring a former NASA astronaut offers a tantalizing look at the private space trips the company plans to offer.

The ESA-developed Sentinel satellite - Sentinel-2A - was launched today, adding a high-resolution optical imaging capability to the European Union Copernicus environmental monitoring system.

Construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) on Hawaii's Mauna Kea volcano, which was halted in April after a series of protests, will resume on Wednesday (June 24), project representatives said in a statement issued...

If we live in a multiverse then Where Is Everybody Else? --

A group of researchers from the Stony Brook University and the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan has discovered 854 "ultra dark galaxies" in the Coma Cluster by analyzing archival data from the Subaru Telescope....

Mercury is a difficult object to spot, because it's always clinging closely to the sun's apron strings. So you might be excused for missing its brief appearance this week in the dawn skies.

A laser-powered wafer-thin spacecraft capable of reaching Alpha Centauri in 20 years may sound like the stuff of science fiction, but it's not. And while such a launch isn't imminent, the possibility of one in the future...

About 20 people opposed to building what would be one of the world's largest telescopes on a Hawaii mountain are camped out near the construction site, vowing to stop work from resuming.

In late 2013, when the neutron star at the heart of one of our galaxy's oddest supernovae gave off a massive burst of X-rays, the resulting echoes--created when the X-rays bounced off clouds of dust in interstellar space...

Composer James Horner, who wrote the scores for "Aliens," "Apollo 13," "Avatar," "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan" and many other high-profile films, died Monday (June 22) in a plane crash, according to media reports.

A new NASA computer simulation shows that dark matter particles colliding in the extreme gravity of a black hole can produce strong, potentially observable gamma-ray light. Detecting this emission would provide astronome...

NASA should focus on building the next full-scale Earth-observing satellite in its long-running Landsat series and forget about a proposed interim capability to ensure continuous coverage in the infrared bands, House and...

NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory:

This week’s Carnival of Space is hosted by Gadi Eidelheit at his The Venus Transit blog.

Kazakh cosmonaut Aidyn Aimbetov will fly to the International Space Station in the fall, filling the seat earlier reserved for British soprano Sarah Brightman. Brightman's backup Satoshi Takamatsu will wait for a later f...

The U.S. Air Force awarded Boeing a $152 million contract June 18 to continue supporting one of the service's primary space surveillance satellites. The post Boeing Nabs Contract for SBSS Block 10 Sustainment appeared fi...

Auroras reached as far south as Philadelphia yesterday (June 22) after a massive burst of particles was ejected from the sun and pummeled Earth's atmosphere. This strong solar storm continues to rage, and auroras are exp...

Arianespace Press Releases:

I’m as guilty as anyone for anthropomorphizing Pluto — as well as spacecraft like New Horizons, which is currently preparing to fly by the dwarf planet. But since spacecraft are really just extensions of ourselves, p...

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory News and Features:

NASA's Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, SOFIA, departed from its base operations in Palmdale, California on June 12 and ferried to Christchurch, New Zealand to complete a five-week mission to study celes...

There's good news for scientists who study animals that are too small to carry a GPS monitor, or that spit ID tags back out through their arms. A setup using an off-the-shelf camera can precisely capture an animal's path...