Tag Archives | space.com

An artist’s illustration of werewolves on the surface of the alien planet TRAPPIST-1b. The scientists over at NASA’s Exoplanet Exploration Program (ExEP) must really love Halloween. Today (Oct. 31), the ExEP website has two fantastically frightening interactive features to celebrate the holiday. The first, titled “Universe of Monsters ,” highlights real-world alien planets that might […]

The United States Mint released the candidate designs developed for the Apollo 11 50th Anniversary Commemorative Coin program. The United States Mint has revealed the candidate designs for the “heads-side” of its planned coins for the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing in 2019. The 18 designs for the Apollo 11 50th Anniversary Commemorative […]

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — NASA is still up to a month away from setting a new target launch date for the first flight of the Space Launch System, but agency officials said they still expected it to take place in 2019. NASA has not set a new date for Exploration Mission (EM) 1, which will launch […]

The GRACE Earth science mission used two spacecraft flying in formation to measure changes in the local gravitational field linked to weather and climate. WASHINGTON — An Earth science mission launched more than 15 years ago has finally come to an end, slightly earlier than previously expected, NASA announced Oct. 27. In a statement, NASA […]

On the moon, there’s no air to breathe, no breezes to make the flags planted there by the Apollo astronauts flutter. However, there is a very, very thin layer of gases on the lunar surface that can almost be called an atmosphere. Technically, it’s considered an exosphere. In an exosphere , the gases are so […]

Night sky watcher Tomsajinsa sent in this photo of the blue moon taken in NYC, August 31, 2012. A “Blue Moon” is a fairly infrequent phenomenon involving the appearance of an additional full moon within a given period. But which period — there are two definitions of the term, and one was borne out of […]

NASA’s OSIRIS-Rex mission will map and study the asteroid Bennu before bringing a sample home. In 2023, a bit of the primordial solar system will return to Earth. That’s when NASA’s OSIRIS-REx (Origins-Spectral Interpretation-Resource Identification-Security-Regolith Explore) mission will return a sample of the asteroid Bennu, a carbon-rich rock hosting traces of the early solar system. […]

The field of stars that the Kepler space telescope examined as it searched for exoplanets. NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope is an observatory in space dedicated to finding planets outside our solar system, particularly alien planets that are around the same size as Earth in the “habitable” regions of their parent star. Since the launch of […]

Artist’s illustration of NASA’s Juno spacecraft at Jupiter. The probe entered orbit around the solar system’s largest planet on July 4, 2016. NASA’s Juno spacecraft, which arrived at Jupiter on July 4, 2016, is studying the planet in detail to give scientists a better idea of the gas giant’s weather, magnetic environment and formation history.  […]

A picture showing the relative sizes of (from left to right) Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. (The images were collected from multiple space missions, then mounted and resized in a single image.) Earlier this year, researchers announced th ey had found fossils of microbial life in the rocks of northern Quebec, Canada dating to at […]

This illustration the hot, dense, expanding cloud of debris stripped from neutron stars just before they collide in a “kilonova,” or an explosion 1,000 times stronger than a typical nova. A long time ago in a galaxy far away—NGC 4993, to be exact—two neutron stars collided and created a spectacular light show. After billions of […]

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches the U.S. Air Force’s X-37B space plane into orbit on Sept. 7, 2017. SpaceX aims to pull off another launch-and-landing double play today (Oct. 30), and you can watch all the spaceflight action live. A SpaceX two-stage Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled to launch the KoreaSat 5A communications satellite […]

The funding from Saudi Arabia will support Virgin efforts like SpaceShipTwo, a suborbital vehicle that will begin a series of powered test flights in the near future. HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — The Virgin Group announced Oct. 26 an agreement with Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund  for an investment of $1 billion into Virgin’s suborbital and orbital space […]