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The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aboard NASA’s Terra satellite acquired a true-color image of frigid air blowing over the Sea of Okhotsk on Nov. 25, 2017. Space observations are crucial to solving the challenges presented by Earth’s complex climate, which will play a pivotal role in humanity’s success or demise, argued an extensive report […]

WASHINGTON — SpaceX is now planning to attempt the first launch of its Falcon Heavy rocket around the end of this month, the company’s chief executive said Jan. 4. In a posting on the social media website Instagram that featured a video of the rocket , Elon Musk said the heavy-lift rocket would launch from […]

Stage Separation Credit: NASA Artist’s illustration showing the Delta IV Heavy’s upper stage, with the spacecraft attached, separating from the rest of the rocket. Flying Freely Credit: NASA The Parker Solar Probe deploys from the rocket’s upper stage. Goodbye, Earth Credit: NASA Artist’s illustration showing the spacecraft zooming away from its home planet. Looping Toward […]

Lead author Laurence Yeung of Rice University has led the discovery of a tug-of-war between biogeochemical and atmospheric nitrogen-producing processes. An enrichment of “heavy” nitrogen in Earth’s atmosphere has been found to represent the balance between biogeochemical and atmospheric production of nitrogen, a signal that one day could potentially be used to suggest the presence […]

For observers in the Americas, Mars and Jupiter will come extremely close together in the southeastern sky, on the mornings of Jan. 6 and 7. It is sometimes difficult to rouse oneself out of a warm bed in the predawn hours to get a view of some celestial event, and that’s especially true now with […]

NASA’s GOLD mission, riding to space with the SES-14 communications satellite, will study Earth’s upper atmosphere from 22,000 miles above the planet. A new NASA mission, the first to hitch a ride on a commercial communications satellite, will examine Earth’s upper atmosphere to see how the boundary between Earth and space changes over time. Researchers […]

Our bright neighboring star system, Alpha Centauri, could harbor an Earth-size planet — but new jumps in technology are needed for us to see it. Technology in development could capture images from an Earth-size planet in the nearby Alpha Centauri system in the 2020s, new research suggests.  The new technique, presented Dec. 15 at the […]

Artist’s impression of NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft encountering 2014 MU69, a Kuiper Belt object that orbits one billion miles (1.6 billion kilometers) beyond Pluto, on Jan. 1, 2019. The countdown to New Horizons’ historic second flyby has now begun in earnest. The NASA spacecraft, which famously zoomed past Pluto in July 2015, is set to […]

The Stafford Air & Space Museum in Oklahoma is marking its 25th year with an expansion campaign. Twenty-five years after it was founded, an astronaut’s hometown museum is looking to expand – just in time to mark a half century since its namesake’s historic flight to the moon. The Stafford Air & Space Museum , […]

Citizen scientists processed this image of Jupiter’s cloud tops using data from NASA’s Juno probe. Jupiter’s twirling, swirling cloud tops look like a sheet of blue velvet in a new image from NASA’s Juno probe . The image was created by citizen scientists Gerald Eichstädt and Seán Doran using raw data from the JunoCam instrument […]

The GOES East satellite recorded this view of bomb cyclone Grayson as it battered the northeast U.S. on Thursday (Jan. 4). As a powerful bomb cyclone winter storm curls across the U.S. East Coast this morning (Jan. 4), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) GOES-East satellite is snapping stunning images of the Earth’s surface. […]

Satellite data enables scientists to map the seafloor, which is sinking under the weight of rising seas. (This map shows gravity anomalies in the western Indian Ocean. The bottom of the ocean is more of a “sunken place” than it used to be. In recent decades, melting ice sheets and glaciers driven by climate change […]

(Updated at 6:26 p.m. ET) An intense “bomb cyclone” is battering the U.S. East Coast today (Jan. 4), with high winds and intense snowfall forecast for the mid-Atlantic and northeastern states. “The storm will produce heavy snow along the Mid-Atlantic Coast into Southern New England by Thursday morning that will move northward into the Northeast by […]