Space News

The amount of methane gas escaping from the ground during the long cold period in the Arctic each year and entering Earth's atmosphere is likely much higher than estimated by current carbon cycle models....

On the last day of 2015, a skycam in northeast Spain caught a tremendous fireball -- a very bright meteor -- burning up in the morning sky: [Photo by Ebro Observatory (E. Blanch / CSIC-URLl - JMTrigo / CSIC-IEEC). Tha...

This visible-light image shows dozens of fires burning in Cambodia....

China's increasingly ambitious space program plans to attempt the first-ever landing of a lunar probe on the moon's far side, a leading engineer said. The Chang'e 4 mission is planned for sometime before 2020, Zou Yongli...

This image of Mars full disc captured from a distance of 55,000 km by India's Mars Orbiter Spacecraft....

There are several space stories we're anticipating for 2016 but one story might appear -- to some -- to belong in the realm of science fiction: sometime in the coming year Elon Musk will likely reveal his plans for colon...

European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut and Expedition 46 Flight Engineer Tim Peake (@astro_timpeake) photographed the Alps from his vantage point aboard the International Space Station on Dec. 27, 2015.

Virtually every planet in the has moons. Earth has the moon, Mars has Phobos and Deimos, and Jupiter and Saturn have 67 and 62 officially named moons, respectively. Heck, even the recently-demoted dwarf planet Pluto has ...

A new way to test one of the basic principles underlying Einstein's theory of General Relativity using brief blasts of rare radio signals from space called Fast Radio Bursts is ten times, to one-hundred times better than...

Gravity is a fundamental force of physics, one which we Earthlings tend to take for granted. You can't really blame us. Having evolved over the course of billions of years in Earth's environment, we are used to living wi...

Planned in the 1960s but never realized, the Gemini-based manned spy satellite was finally declassified in 2015.

Fifty grams of plutonium-238 -- the stuff that powers many deep-space missions, such as the New Horizons mission to Pluto -- was produced at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee. It's the first batch made in...

In a decidedly wintry-looking scene, frost-filled fractures fills a crater near the north pole of Mars -- as observed by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

The word from Russia is that the country wants to send monkeys to the Red Planet by 2017. But waving the red flag on such a plan: People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).

It's 2016? Already? OK then. Well, in 2014 I wrote a year-end wrap up of the blog, talking about mistakes I made, posts I liked writing, and all that. And I'd do it again for 2015, but as it happens I already made a vide...

The confirmed oceans alone add up to 50 times the amount of water on Earth --

(University of British Columbia) Researchers have found a new way to measure the pull of gravity at the surface of a star. For distant stars with planets orbiting them, this information is key in determining whether any ...

What was the biggest news in astronomy this past year? The editorial board of Discover has helpfully provided an answer, one that I heartily endorse (and not only because I wrote the related story in the magazine): It wa...

NASA WALLOPS FLIGHT FACILITY, VA - Assembly and testing of a significantly upgraded version of Orbital ATK's commercially developed Antares rocket has kicked into high gear and is on target for rebirth - as the clock tic...