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,…
Category: Space
NASA’s Hubble, MAVEN help solve the mystery of Mars’s escaping water
These are far-ultraviolet Hubble images of Mars near its farthest point from the sun, called aphelion, on December 31, 2017 (top), and near its closest approach to the sun, called…
Lucky alignment of 2 spacecraft reveals how solar wind gets a magnetic push
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…
NASA admits tension with Boeing over space rescue plan
This handout image courtesy of Maxar Technologies taken on June 7, 2024 shows the Boeing Starliner spacecraft docked with the International Space Station’s (ISS) forward port on the station’s Harmony…
How we could warm Mars
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 mini BurstCube mission detects its first gamma-ray burst
BurstCube, trailed by another CubeSat named SNOOPI (Signals of Opportunity P-band Investigation), emerges from the International Space Station on April 18, 2024. Credit: NASA/Matthew Dominick The shoebox-sized BurstCube satellite has…
Work Is Under Way on NASA’s Next-Generation Asteroid Hunter
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…
Scientist discusses the MESSENGER mission to Mercury
Credit: CC0 Public Domain Twenty years ago, the MESSENGER mission revolutionized our understanding of Mercury. We sat down with project head and former Carnegie Science director Sean Solomon to talk…
NASA lines up return date for Boeing Starliner minus humans
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain A Butch- and Suni-less Boeing Starliner has been given a date to return to Earth by NASA. Teams with NASA and Boeing gave the green light…
Data from space probes show that Alfvén waves drive the acceleration and heating of the solar wind
NASA’s Parker Solar Probe and ESA’s Solar Orbiter missions measuring the same stream of plasma flowing away from the sun at different distances. Parker measured copious magnetic waves near the…
