Evidence of Ancient Life Found Buried Under an Asteroid Crater
We’re all made of star-stuff.
China launches ‘human artificial embryos’ to space in bid to see whether reproduction is possible off-world
China’s Tianzhou-10 mission just delivered embryo-like structures made from living stem cells to the Tiangong space station. Experiments could shed light on how radiation and microgravity affect human…
NASA to add missions to SpaceX commercial crew contract
NASA plans to add missions to SpaceX’s commercial crew contract, protecting the agency from the possibility that Boeing’s spacecraft is never certified.
Massive gravity “hole” beneath the Indian Ocean finally gets a possible explanation after decades of scientific mystery
For decades, a vast region south of India has quietly refused to make sense. Satellites mapping Earth’s shape kept returning the same unsettling result: the ocean surface there sits noticeably lower than it should, as if something invisible is pulling it down from below.
A NASA satellite launched in 1976 carries a Carl Sagan–designed plaque sealed inside its core, mapping Earth’s continents 268 million years ago, at launch, and 8.4 million years from now — and that last date is no accident, because it’s roughly when the satellite is expected to fall back to Earth and finally be opened.
On 4 May 1976, NASA launched a satellite called LAGEOS-1 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. It is one of the simplest objects ever put into orbit. It is a sphere about 60 centimetres across, weighing roughly 400 kilograms, with no electronics, no sensors, no power source, and no moving parts. It is a […]
Atomic oxygen in low Earth orbit slowly eats spacecraft surfaces, and the ISS survives because engineers learned to coat, test, and replace the materials most vulnerable to it
Atomic oxygen, the most common particle in low Earth orbit, chemically erodes spacecraft surfaces continuously. The ISS survives only because every external material has been chosen, coated, and scheduled for replacement against this slow molecular attack.
The Vela satellites were built to catch secret nuclear tests, but they accidentally recorded flashes from deep space that opened a new branch of astrophysics
The U.S. military’s nuclear detection satellites started catching mysterious gamma-ray flashes in 1967 that did not match any known weapon signature. The discovery stayed classified for six years before it became clear the flashes were exploding stars billions of light-years away.
Webb just clocked nearly 9,000 young star clusters and found the biggest ones break from their birth clouds in 5 million years, a timing clue that could reshape how astronomers model galaxies growing up
The James Webb Space Telescope has given astronomers a sharper look at how young star clusters escape their birthplaces, and the result cuts against the simple intuition that smaller clusters should clear out faster. In a Nature Astronomy study, researchers used Hubble and Webb observations of thousands of young star clusters in four nearby galaxies […]
SpaceX plans morning launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base
SpaceX is planning to launch a Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base on Sunday. The launch window is open between 7 a.m. and 11 a.m.
Titan’s atmosphere is thicker than Earth’s, its rivers and lakes are made of methane and ethane, and NASA is sending a nuclear-powered drone there because on Saturn’s largest moon, flying may be easier than driving.
Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, has a denser atmosphere than Earth and a surface where rain, rivers, and seas are made of liquid hydrocarbons rather than water. And NASA is building a rotorcraft to explore it, because Titan’s physical conditions genuinely favour flight in a way no other body in the solar system does. […]