ULA targets Christmas Eve for debut of new Vulcan rocket | Space Quiz! What resource found on the moon and Mars do scientists hope to utilize to help sustain long-term crewed missions on other planets? | Hunter's Moon lunar eclipse, last eclipse of 2023 (photos)
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The coming holiday season will be extra festive for space fans, if all goes according to plan. United Launch Alliance is targeting Christmas Eve for the debut flight of its new Vulcan Centaur rocket, the successor to the company's Atlas V and Delta IV vehicles.
The moon passed through part of Earth’s shadow in a partial lunar eclipse visible to potentially millions of stargazers across the Eastern Hemisphere on Saturday, offering an early skywatching treat days before Halloween.
Walter Isaacson shadowed Elon Musk for more than two years, interviewing dozens of sources, to write the defining book on the most fascinating, controversial innovator of our time and his vision for the future. Read Now
Simply put, their occurrence is dependent on solar activity. The more active the sun, the higher the chance of vibrant aurora shows - and that's exactly why we can expect incredible auroras over the next few years.
The turmoil & triumph of Elon Musk From the author of Steve Jobs and other bestselling biographies, this is the astonishingly intimate story of the most fascinating and controversial innovator of our era—a rule-breaking visionary who helped to lead the world into the era of electric vehicles, private space exploration, and artificial intelligence. Read More
The U.K. Space Agency and Houston company Axiom Space have inked a deal to pursue a commercially sponsored mission that could send four U.K. astronauts to orbit. No timeline for the proposed flight has been announced.
The size of Uranus' rings is controlled by the planet's five major moons, which are able to eject significant amounts of dust out of the Uranian system, according to new simulations designed to figure out where the rings may have come from.
It will be the eighth launch and landing for this rocket's first stage, according to the mission description. The 23 Starlink satellites will deploy from the Falcon 9's upper stage into low Earth orbit about 65.5 minutes after liftoff, if all goes according to plan.
Scientists recently fired up the world's smallest particle accelerator for the first time. The tiny technological triumph, which is around the size of a small coin, could open the door to a wide range of applications, including using the teensy particle accelerators inside human patients.
The NASA-funded Subsurface Water Ice Mapping (SWIM) project released its fourth and most recent map of where on Mars we might find, as you might expect, subsurface water ice. NASA officials say this map will help mission planners decide where on Mars to actually send the first humans to traverse the planet.
In this second installment, available now at the "First Woman" website, readers will discover how Callie and her fellow astronauts work together as a unit to overcome various obstacles while trying to install a next-generation telescope on the far side of the moon.
Two weeks after casting its shadow across the Americas during an annular solar eclipse, the moon will swing around to skim through the northern edge of the Earth's own shadow on Saturday, Oct. 28. Here's what to expect during the partial lunar eclipse, which will be visible primarily from the Eastern Hemisphere of Earth (but folks across the US, North America and elsewhere can watch it online!).
Testing is now underway on NASA's Dragonfly rotorcraft, a nuclear-powered, car-sized aerial drone that will look for potential precursors to life on Saturn's moon, Titan. But before Dragonfly can take to the sky, NASA has to make sure it can withstand the moon's unique environment.
The mobile launcher for a big moon mission got all wet in a big test this week. To get ready for Artemis 2, set to carry astronauts around the moon in late 2024, the mobile launcher that will be used to launch the powerful Space Launch System rocket had a "water flow test." It was the third in an ongoing series at NASA's Kennedy Space Center to "verify the overpressure protection and sound suppression system is ready for launch," NASA officials said.
The three spaceflyers of the Shenzhou 17 mission reached China's Tiangong space station early Thursday morning, just 6.5 hours or so after lifting off atop a Long March 2F rocket from the Gobi Desert. The Shenzhou 17 crew consists of mission commander Tang Hongbo, 48, and former fighter pilots Tang Shengjie, 34, and Jiang Xinlin, 35. They're the youngest group ever to visit Tiangong, which China began assembling in low Earth orbit in April 2021 and finished about 18 months later. "Build a dream at the Tiangong space station and continue to work hard," they said in unison in China's CCTV news video.
Earth's premier gravitational wave detector just received a major upgrade that will significantly improve its ability to spot ripples in the fabric of space and time - undulations created by collisions between black holes or neutron stars, and sometimes, between both. "We can now reach the deeper universe and are expecting to detect about 60 percent more mergers than before," scientists say.
Early next month, SpaceX will send a clutch of science experiments to the International Space Station investigating a range of topics, from high-speed laser communications to rolling atmospheric waves on Earth. Called ILLUMA-T, the laser aims to boost ISS communications while assisting future missions in deep space.
It was only a matter of time before the James Webb Space Telescope's vibrant repertoire of images and impressive backstory were turned into film, and director Nathaniel Kahn's enchanting "Deep Sky" is exactly that. "There is this kind of power the images have. It really isn't from us. We're creating the context in which you can appreciate them, but we're not forcing it," its director Nathaniel Kahn says.
