The Ingenuity Mars helicopter was never supposed to last this long. NASA engineers built and tested the first self-powered aircraft to fly on another planet to answer a simple question:…
Category: Space
A space rock called Kamoʻoalewa may be a piece of the moon
The moon’s violent history is written across its face. Over billions of years, space rocks have punched craters into its surface, flinging out debris. Now, for the first time, astronomers…
Pluto’s dark side reveals clues to its atmosphere and frost cycles
Pluto’s dark side has come into dim view, thanks to the light of the dwarf planet’s moon. When NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flew past Pluto in 2015, almost all the…
What the Perseverance rover’s quiet landing reveals about meteor strikes on Mars
The lander was listening. On February 18, NASA’s InSight lander on Mars turned its attention to the landing site for another mission, Perseverance, hoping to detect its arrival on the…
An X-ray glow suggests black holes or neutron stars fuel weird cosmic ‘cows’
A brilliant blast from a galaxy 2 billion light-years away is the brightest cosmic “Cow” found yet. It’s the fifth known object in this new class of exploding stars and…
An early outburst portends a star’s imminent death
A star’s death usually comes without warning. But an early sign of one star’s imminent demise hints at what happens before some stellar explosions. In a last hurrah before exploding,…
Astronomers identified a second possible exomoon
Some of the same researchers who found the first purported exomoon now say that they’ve found another. Dubbed Kepler 1708 b i, the satellite has a radius about 2.6 times…
Two stars’ close encounter may explain a cosmic flare that has barely faded
A newborn star whizzing past another stellar youngster triggered a cosmic flare-up that began nearly a century ago and is still going strong today, researchers say. In late 1936, a…
Spacecraft in 2021 set their sights on Mars, asteroids and beyond
While a flurry of missions crowded around Mars this year, some lesser-explored parts of the solar system are about to get fresh eyes. Three countries visited the Red Planet in…
Red giant stars that eat planets might shine less brightly
When giant stars eat giant planets, their starlight may shine a bit less brightly. That dimming could affect how astronomers measure distances across the universe — and possibly even put…
