Space News

Tests suggest the European Extremely Large Telescope will be able to detect crucial biosignatures on other worlds.

After a few days of wakefulness, Japan’s SLIM moon lander has gone dormant once more at the start of a 14-day-long lunar night. The upended robot sent back a stream of data and imagery while its solar cells were in pos...

The International Space Station busted a move above Earth Jan. 27, allowing space station astronauts to use physics for a floating ride in orbit.

The four astronauts of the private Ax-3 mission will depart the International Space Station in their SpaceX Dragon capsule on Saturday (Feb. 3), and you can watch the action live.

Astronomers have found a new Super-Earth orbiting an M-dwarf (red dwarf) star about 137 light-years away. The planet is named TOI-715b, and it’s about 1.55 Earth’s radius and is inside the star’s habitable zone. Th...

Firefly Aerospace plans to make the responsive launch operations it demonstrated for the U.S. Space Force last year the norm for upcoming launches of its Alpha rocket. The post Firefly to continue responsive launch opera...

NASA is wrapping up the design phase of a project to develop concepts for a small, electricity-generating nuclear fission reactor for use on the moon.

Students from California and Massachusetts will have separate opportunities next week to hear from NASA astronauts aboard the International Space Station. The two Earth-to-space calls will air live Monday, Feb. 5, and Fr...

On Deception Island in Antarctica, steam rises from the beaches, and glaciers dot the black slopes of what is actually an active volcano--a rare clash of ice and fire that provides clues to scientists about what life cou...

A classic toy brand is putting its foot down on how NASA rockets are launched. After 30 years of producing "kid-powered" projectiles of its own design, Stomp Rocket is releasing its first NASA set.

Teams from ESA, France's space agency CNES and ArianeGroup successfully completed the disconnection and retraction of the Ariane 6 cryogenic systems on 30 January 2024.

Humanity's quest to explore--and, perhaps eventually, colonize--outer space has prompted a great many ideas about how precisely to go about it.

NASA will provide live coverage of the undocking and departure of the Axiom Mission 3 (Ax-3) private astronaut flight from the International Space Station before the crew returns to Earth.  The four-member astronaut cre...

Neutron stars' collisions create powerful explosions, a type of gamma-ray burst known as a kilonova. What would it be like to be too close to a kilonova? Work has been done to calculate the risk of being in the beam of a...

Although the exact nature of dark matter continues to elude astronomers, we have gained some understanding of its general physical properties. We know how it clusters around galaxies, how it makes up much of the matter i...

The Vera Rubin Observatory (VRO) is different to other large telescopes, and that difference makes it more vulnerable to space junk. Other telescopes, like the Giant Magellan Telescope and the European Extremely Large Te...

Sierra Space and NASA revealed the company's first Dream Chaser cargo spacecraft, which is undergoing testing before its inaugural spaceflight later this year.

The study of "exoplanets," the sci-fi-sounding name for all planets in the cosmos beyond our own solar system, is a fairly new field. Mainly, exoplanet researchers like those in the ExoLab at the University of Kansas use...

Maybe you read about them in the papers-amateur astronomers in Japan, Russia, France, Finland, and the United States have been pulling all-nighters to spot extraordinary exoplanets, planets orbiting stars other than the ...

Eutelsat said Feb. 2 it has stopped providing services from an aging geostationary satellite over the Americas following an unspecified anomaly. The post Eutelsat stops services on aging satellite following anomaly appea...

A team of astronomers, led by Arizona State University Assistant Research Scientist Tim Carleton, has discovered a dwarf galaxy that appeared in James Webb Space Telescope imaging that wasn't the primary observation targ...

On Feb. 3, 1994, space shuttle Discovery took off on its 18th flight, STS-60. Its six-person crew of Commander Charles F. Bolden, Pilot Kenneth S. Reightler, and Mission Specialists N. Jan Davis, Ronald M. Sega, Franklin...