In 2021, NASA’s Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment, or CAPSTONE, CubeSat will launch to a never-before-used cislunar orbit near the Moon….
In early 2016, an icy visitor from the edge of our solar system hurtled past Earth. It briefly became visible to stargazers as Comet Catalina…
What’s fueling the massive ejection of gas and dust out of the Cigar galaxy, otherwise known as Messier 82? We know that thousands of stars…
The hungriest of black holes are thought to gobble up so much surrounding material they put an end to the life of their host galaxy….
Living in space isn’t easy. There are notable impacts on the biology of living things in the harsh environment of space. A team of scientists…
Since astronomers confirmed the presence of planets beyond our solar system, called exoplanets, humanity has wondered how many could harbor life. Now, we’re one step closer…
The mountains discovered on Pluto during the New Horizons spacecraft’s flyby of the dwarf planet in 2015 are covered by a blanket of methane ice,…
NASA has awarded Astrobotic of Pittsburgh $199.5 million to deliver NASA’s Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) to the Moon’s South Pole in late 2023….
Science fiction often imagines our future on Mars and other planets as run by machines, with metallic cities and flying cars rising above dunes of…
The Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, SOFIA, studies the universe with infrared light. That’s a range of wavelengths on the infrared spectrum, from those measuring…
One of the brightest and most massive star-forming regions in our galaxy, the Omega, or Swan, Nebula, came to resemble the shape resembling a swan’s…
SOFIA Reveals New View of Milky Way’s Center NASA has captured an extremely crisp infrared image of the center of our Milky Way galaxy. Spanning…
New research on older data from NASA’s Mars Orbiter reveals evidence of significant hydration near the Martian equator — a mysterious signature in a region…
New research reveals that the strange formations on Pluto’s surface are made almost entirely of methane ice, and likely formed as a specific kind of…
A team at NASA’s Ames Research Center has created a simulated lunar environment to study lighting conditions experienced at the unexplored poles of the Moon….
Using the Pleiades supercomputer, NASA scientists are simulating asteroid impacts to help identify possible life-threatening events. When an asteroid struck the Russian city of Chelyabinsk…
Using NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope, a team of astronomers has identified a regular pattern in the orbits of the planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system. This…
New SOFIA observations show the true composition of Ceres, revealing that it does not appear to have the carbon-rich surface composition that telescopes previously indicated….