Category: Astronomy

If we took a scenic drive through every era of astronomy, we’d start somewhere among ancient humans wondering why there are stationary fireflies stuck in the sky. We’d travel through…

SpaceX’s Starship megarocket will start flying Mars missions just two years from now, if all goes according to plan. “These will be uncrewed to test the reliability of landing intact…

Saturn will reach opposition this weekend when the ringed planet and the sun are directly opposite of each other in the sky.  Just after midnight tonight, Saturn will appear at…

The BepiColombo Mercury probe made a flyby of its ultimate destination on Wednesday, capturing superb images of the planet’s crater-covered crust. The joint European-Japanese BepiColombo spacecraft, which launched in 2018,…

Our sun is far from the smooth, unvarying ball of light we see in the sky. Up close, its “surface” rumbles with powerful eddies that routinely burp superheated material into…

Ever since learning the surface of the planet Mars is cold and dead, scientists have wondered if there was a way to make it friendlier to life. A team including…

NASA’s new asteroid-hunting spacecraft is taking shape at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. The NEO Surveyor (Near-Earth Object Surveyor) is a cutting-edge infrared space telescope that seeks out…

The team needs a fixed time and a location to prepare the airborne observation experiment. A controlled reentry would make that a breeze, but Cluster was not designed with this…

Previously, Gaia had explored asteroids known to have moons — so-called ‘binary asteroids’ — and confirmed that the telltale signs of these tiny moons show up in the telescope’s ultra-accurate astrometric…

A team of international astronomers using the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), part of the U.S. National Science Foundation National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), have gathered the most precise and…