Private Blue Ghost lander aims for weekend moon landing! | NASA Lunar Trailblazer suffers glitch en route to moon | What time is SpaceX's Starship Flight 8 launch on March 3?
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Hey, Space Fans! As we close out the week (and the whole month) today, we're all on the edge of our seats. Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lander is headed for the moon.
If all goes well, Blue Ghost will land in Mare Crisium ("Sea of Crises") on the moon's Earth-facing side early Sunday, March 2. You'll be able to watch it live on Space.com then starting around 2:30 a.m. ET. Can't wait? Check out Blue Ghost's awesome views of the moon's far side here!
Speaking of moon probes, NASA's new Lunar Trailblazer just hitched a ride toward the moon with Intuitive Machines' Athena lunar lander, but the small orbiter is in trouble already. Flight controllers lost contact with it after launch, but here's where everything stands now.
Private spaceflight isn't stopping at just a moon landing in the next week. SpaceX says its ready to launch the world's largest rocket again on Monday, March 3. The Starship Flight 8 test flight is scheduled for 6:30 p.m. ET on Monday from SpaceX's Starbase in South Texas. Here's when and where to tune in.
If this week's awesome launches has your space cadet (or you yourself, no judgement) wanting to launch something, too, this Nat Geo Power Rocket may be just the ticket. And right now, you can save big will building your own mini space program. Here's how.
Have you noticed that more auroras have been visible in recent years, including from lower latitudes? Us, too. That's why we started looking into it. Here's what experts told us on why the northern lights have been amped up lately.
If it wasn't clear yet in this newsletter, there's something happening at the moon. For the first time in history, three different private companies are hoping to land on the moon in the coming days and weeks. The U.S. companies Firefly Aerospace and Intuitive Machines, along with Japan's ispace company, all hope to land their own probes (some with rovers and more) soon.
On the astronomy front, we've been following the hunt for dark matter for decades, but new research has revealed a surprising fact: Dark matter, widely known as the universe's most mysterious stuff, is rarer on Earth than gold. And that's despite the fact that dark matter outweighs "ordinary matter" by a staggering ratio of five to one. So what gives? Here's what we found.
Sunday night football may be over, but that doesn't mean NASA's taking a break. The space agency will launch two critical new space missions, the universe-mapping SPHEREx telescope and twin PUUNCH probes to study the sun. Liftoff is set for Sunday night, but their science could last a lifetime.
We've talked a lot about some amazing real-life space probes and science today, but this week also brought the world the 10th annual Pokémon day and it got us thinking: Are there any Pokémon from space? Believe me, we were as surprised as you when we made this list.
Let's close out the week with something historic that happened today in space.
On Feb. 28, 1959, the U.S. Air Force launched a new spy satellite prototype called Discoverer 1. But the mission didn't go entirely according to plan. After Discoverer 1 passed out of radar range somewhere in the Southern Hemisphere, it went missing. See how it happened in our "On This Day in Space" video series!
Hey, Space Fans! It's officially "Moon-day" with SpaceX's successfully launch of a new private moon lander for Intuitive Machines. But there's more to this mission than just one moon probe.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 launched Athena, Intuitive Machines' 2nd moon lander, last night alongside a small hopping robot, a tiny commercial lunar lander and NASA's Lunar Trailblazer to seek out moon water. Plus, Astroforge's Odin asteroid recon probe and an Epic Aerospace orbital tug. Check it out.
The moon may be close to home, astronomically speaking, but things get weird way out in the Oort Cloud and now we've got proof. A NASA supercomputer has found a vast spiral-shaped structure made of billions of comets at the edge of our solar system that are arranged much like our own Milky Way galaxy! Here's what the simulation found.
Getting more down to Earth, it turns out that being a superstar is literally out of this world. Katy Perry is headed to space.
Blue Origin announced today that Perry is one of six women it will launch on the historic first all-female space crew later this year. Perry and a team of celebrity scientists, journalists and luminaries will lauch this spring on a suborbital New Shepard rocket.
We now have a fine opportunity to view the planet that many astronomy guide books refer to as the most difficult of the naked-eye planets to see: Mercury. Now through mid-March, this somewhat overgrown version of the moon will have an evening appearance about as favorable as we ever get. Here's how.
Speaking of launches, Russia is celebrating one of its own today with the Progress MS-30 mission to the International Space Station. The ship, carrying tons of fresh supplies, is also celebrating the 100th birthday of famed cosmonaut Pavel Belyayev. Find out why.
The James Webb Space Telescope is barely 4 years into its mission, but scientists are already trying to use it to solve one of the biggest mysteries in the cosmos: What's the deal the dark matter?
SpaceX is on a tear with rocket launches this week, but we're going to have to wait a bit longer for one highly anticipated flight. The company's Starship Flight 8 test mission will now fly no earlier than March 3, that's a 3-day delay.
One thing that wasn't delayed last night was SpaceX's latest Starlink fleet. The company launched 21 Starlink satellites into orbit from Florida just hours after a different Falcon 9 rocket launched the Intuitive Machines moon lander in back to back flights!
On Feb. 27, 1942, a British physicist named James Stanley Hey accidentally found out that the sun emits radio waves. Hey was working for the Army Operational Research Group in the middle of World War II. His job was to find ways to stop the Germans from jamming British radars.
Hey received reports that anti-aircraft radars were experiencing severe noise jamming. In other words, foreign radio-frequency signals were interfering with the radars' ability to operate. When he investigated the signals, he realized that they weren't coming from Nazis — they were coming from the sun! More specifically, they were coming from an active sunspot.
