Tag Archives | space.com

WASHINGTON — It’s one of those ideas that never really goes away: The deployment of missiles in space  to intercept ballistic missiles aimed at the United States and its allies. With North Korea testing ever more advanced nuclear weapons and delivery systems, the push to place interceptors in space is back in the conversation. Congress is […]

Update: Check out more amazing SpaceX launch photos by our readers here: UFO? No, It’s a SpaceX Rocket! These Falcon 9 Launch Photos Are Just Amazing MISSION VIEJO, Calif. — Wow! Talk about some Friday night lights! A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lit up the evening sky over Southern California last night (Dec. 22) in a […]

From Andy Weir’s follow-up book to “The Martian ” to the view from space courtesy of British astronaut (and wrong-number-dialer) Tim Peake, Space.com brings you the spaceflight, space science, photo, science fiction and kids’ space books you should know about from 2017. For more, check out our Best Space Books and Sci-Fi  pages, including Best Astronomy and […]

The star Achernar and the constellation Eridanus. As we are now well into Christmas week, many neighborhoods are marking the holiday season. Streets, homes and stores are decorated in lights and festooned in evergreen, and everywhere, there’s the smiling face of jolly old Saint Nick. When I was a young boy growing up in the […]

Two NASA astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) share some of their favorite Christmas memories in a new holiday video. Expedition 54 flight engineer Joe Acaba recalled a family trip to the Turks and Caicos Islands, a British territory in the Caribbean, for a special tropical Christmas. “We were celebrating my sister-in-law’s 5-year battle […]

Update for 10 p.m. ET: SpaceX has successfully launched the 10-satellite Iridium-4 mission in a spectacular evening launch. See our launch wrap story with video and photos here: Used SpaceX Rocket Launches 10 Communications Satellites Once Again Two rockets are scheduled to launch within 1 minute of each other tonight (Dec. 22), and you can catch […]

NASA’s Voyager spacecraft are humanity’s most distant emissaries. Paul Sutter is an astrophysicist at The Ohio State University and the chief scientist at COSI science center . Sutter is also host of “Ask a Spaceman ” and “Space Radio ,” and leads AstroTours around the world. Sutter contributed this article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed […]

Some nights when we look up at the moon, it is full and bright; sometimes it is just a sliver of silvery light. These changes in appearance are the phases of the moon. As the moon orbits Earth, it cycles through eight distinct phases. The four primary phases occur about a week apart. Lunar calendar […]

President Donald Trump discusses space policy at the White House Dec. 11, 2017. WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is elevating the role of the privately funded space industry  in advancing the nation’s interests as competitors like Russia and China seek to challenge the United States and its free rein in space. In the 2017 National […]

Things spread out. They cool down, disintegrate and die. Disorder is going to kill the universe . Chaos increases. It’s everywhere, and it’s growing. Scientists know this. And yet, researchers have now demonstrated that there are certain circumstances in which disorder is beat back briefly. In a paper published Nov. 9 on the online preprint […]

The Hubble mosaic unveils a collection of carved knots of gas and dust in a small portion of the Monkey Head Nebula (also known as NGC 2174 and Sharpless Sh2-252). The nebula is a star-forming region that hosts dusky dust clouds silhouetted against glowing gas. Astrophysics is a branch of space science that applies the […]

On the winter solstice, the sun is at its southernmost point in the sky in the Northern Hemisphere. The winter solstice is in full stride today (Dec. 21), which boasts the fewest hours of daylight for 2017 in the Northern Hemisphere. Although the solstice gets an entire day of recognition, it happens in an instant: […]

When skywatchers think of meteor showers during the month of December, they immediately think of the Geminids, which has evolved over the years into the most prolific and reliable of the dozen or so annual meteor displays. But there is another notable meteor shower in December that, in contrast, hardly gets any notice: the December […]