Space news: NASA missions, planetary science, and the new space race.
Two years ago, something slammed into the moon hard enough to leave a crater the size of a city block, and nobody noticed. NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has now confirmed the aftermath: the biggest fresh impact crater known anywhere in…
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft may have caught Pluto doing something nobody expected: letting liquid ooze across its surface. A new study led by the Southwest Research Institute finds dark markings on Pluto’s giant heart-shaped glacier that look a lot like…
Black holes are famous for pulling matter in, but new observations show they are even more violent when pushing gas out. Winds driven by a supermassive black hole carry roughly 100 times more energy than scientists had estimated, stirring gas…
Just as the skin of a drying fruit wrinkles as it shrinks, the planet Mercury has crumpled into ridges and cliffs over billions of years as its interior cooled. But new research suggests the small planet has shrunk far more…
September’s night sky is putting on one of its best shows of the year, and you do not need a telescope for most of it. The month features brilliant Venus at its best, the Milky Way’s hazy core overhead, and…
Earth’s climate may carry the fingerprints of a journey we barely notice: the Sun’s slow orbit around the center of the Milky Way. New NASA-funded studies suggest our planet’s climate has been influenced by both the Sun’s travels through dense…
NASA and SpaceX have delayed the Crew-13 mission to the International Space Station after engineers found an oxidizer leak in the Dragon spacecraft’s propulsion system during prelaunch preparations. The issue was discovered during routine checkout, and teams are investigating before…
The universe is running out of stars, but maybe not for the reason astronomers thought. Star formation across the cosmos has fallen dramatically over the past 4.5 billion years, and a new study has uncovered a surprising twist: the supply…
A magnetar — a neutron star with the most extreme magnetic field known in the universe — has apparently done what no laboratory could: revealed signs of a quantum effect that Werner Heisenberg predicted nearly 90 years ago. Its light…
Mars may be hiding a split personality. New research suggests the Red Planet’s southern interior is hundreds of degrees hotter than its northern half — and may even be partially molten deep below the surface. The finding could rewrite what…