The mission team for NASA’s InSight lander called off its attempts to try to dig deeper into Mars with the heat probe known as “the mole.” Meanwhile, the rest of the mission gained an extension to December 2022.
Posted by Theresa Wiegert in Human World | Space|16 hours ago
FAST’s 500-meter (1,640-foot) dish makes it the world’s largest single-dish radio observatory. It’s expected to open to international observers in 2021.
SpaceX launched 60 more of its Starlink satellites on January 20, 2021. SpaceX ultimately intends to launch tens of thousands of these satellites, to provide global internet access. Here’s why astronomers are concerned.
The surface features of brown dwarfs – objects midway in mass between planets and stars – can’t be seen. But researchers have found a way to reveal Jupiter-like stripes and bands in the atmosphere of the closest brown dwarf, Luhman 16B.
This final test of NASA’s SLS megarocket was needed to launch the first uncrewed mission in the Artemis program – Artemis 1 – by the end of 2021. Now the program’s schedule is uncertain.
Astronomers have a new measurement for the distance of quasar J0313-1806, making it the new record-holder for the most distant quasar known. We’re seeing it just 670 million years after the Big Bang, or more than 13 billion light-years away.
Space’sX CRS-21 Cargo Dragon returned to Earth from the ISS today, January 13, 2021, splashing down off the coast of Florida for the first time ever. The ship also succeeded in the first-ever autonomous undocking.
New work agrees with older research suggesting the oldest light in the universe – from the most distant galaxy yet known – started its journey toward us 13.77 billion years ago.
Astronomers have obtained one of the best images yet of a brown dwarf, an object in a mass range midway between stars and planets. This brown dwarf – called HD 33632 Ab – lies 86 light-years from our sun.
Solar Cycle 25 is here, and that means – in the years ahead – more solar flares and more coronal mass ejections, or CMEs. People sometimes use the words interchangeably, but they’re not the same thing. Here’s the difference.
A new study from Northwestern University shows that solar flares – space weather – might not always be as dangerous for life on exoplanets as typically thought. In fact, it might even help astronomers discover alien life on distant worlds.
Posted by Eddie Irizarry in Astronomy Essentials | Space|2 weeks ago
On March 21, when asteroid 2001 FO32 sweeps past Earth, it’ll be moving at such a fast pace that observers using telescopes might be able to detect its motion – its drift in front of the stars – in real time.
Researchers have been busily building a prototype of a 33-pound (15 kg) lunar mini-robot, set to be the key instrument in a future mission aimed at capturing high-definition images of moon pits.
The Mars Ice Mapper is a proposed Mars satellite being developed by NASA in collaboration with the Canadian Space Agency. Its job is to create detailed geographic maps of water ice across the surface of the red planet.