There are moments in the history of human thought when a simple realization transforms our understanding of reality. A moment when chaos reveals itself as structure, when disorder folds into meaning, and when what seemed like an arbitrary universe unveils itself as a system governed by hidden symmetries.
SpaceX founder Elon Musk said Saturday its massive Starship rocket would leave for Mars at the end of 2026 with Tesla humanoid robot Optimus onboard, adding that human landings could follow “as soon as 2029.”
Wombats are furry, nocturnal marsupials found only in Australia.
Following the 3,000th orbit of NASA’s AWE (Atmospheric Waves Experiment) aboard the International Space Station, researchers publicly released the mission’s first trove of scientific data, crucial to investigating how and why subtle changes in Earth’s atmosphere cause disturbances, as well as how these atmospheric disturbances impact technological systems on the ground and in space.
Astrophysicists have once again enriched our knowledge of the cosmos with a new discovery: two small planets orbiting TOI-1453. Located at around 250 light years from Earth in the Draco constellation, this star is part of a binary system (a pair of stars orbiting each other) and is slightly cooler and smaller than our sun. This discovery, published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, paves the way for future atmospheric studies to better understand these types of planets.
Just hours after touching down on the surface of the moon on March 2nd aboard Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost 1 lander, the Southwest Research Institute-led Lunar Magnetotelluric Sounder (LMS) was activated and deployed its five sensors to study the moon’s interior by measuring electric and magnetic fields. The LMS instrument is the first extraterrestrial application of magnetotellurics.
Stargazers across a swath of the world marveled at a dramatic red “blood moon” during a rare total lunar eclipse in the early hours of Friday morning.
More than 3 billion years ago, Mars intermittently had liquid water on its surface. After the planet lost much of its atmosphere, however, surface water could no longer persist. The fate of Mars’s water—whether it was buried as ice, confined in deep aquifers, incorporated into minerals or dissipated into space—remains an area of ongoing research, one of particular interest to LASP Senior Research Scientist Bruce Jakosky, former principal investigator of the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) mission.
CubeSats have a lot of advantages. They are small, inexpensive, and easily reproducible. But those advantages also come with significant disadvantages—they have trouble linking into broader constellations that allow them to be more effective at their observational or communication tasks. A team from the University of Albany thinks they might have solved that problem by using a customized calibration algorithm to ensure the right CubeSats link up together.
When we observe distant celestial objects, there is a possible catch: Is that star I am observing really as reddish as it appears? Or does the star merely look reddish, since its light has had to travel through a cloud of cosmic dust to reach our telescope?
The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), in partnership with NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC), has developed StarBurst, a small satellite (SmallSat) instrument for NASA’s StarBurst Multimessenger Pioneer mission, which will detect the emission of short gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), a key electromagnetic (EM) signature that will contribute to the understanding of neutron star (NS) mergers.
A “blood moon” will bathe a large swath of the world in red light overnight Thursday during a rare total lunar eclipse.
An international team of astronomers working with the Canada France Hawaii Telescope have discovered a whopping 128 more moons orbiting Saturn. The Minor Planet Center confirmed the discoveries on March 11. The team observed Saturn repeatedly between 2019 and 2021 and combined multiple images, reducing noise and strengthening the signal from the moons. Initially, they found 64 new moons and many more objects that couldn’t be confirmed at the time.
After every federal employee received an email asking them to list their recent accomplishments, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk took to his social media platform X, warning any employee who didn’t respond would be terminated. NASA, instead, asserted that replying was optional and that its leadership would handle the matter.
Australia’s top diplomat urged a visiting American influencer on Thursday to “leave the baby wombat alone,” after a video appeared to show the woman pestering a young marsupial.
Stargazers in North and South America will be able to view a red-colored “blood moon” starting Thursday night in the first total lunar eclipse visible on the continents since 2022.
It covers nearly three-quarters of our planet but the ocean floor is less mapped than the moon, an astonishing fact driving a global push to build the clearest-ever picture of the seabed.
A launch pad problem prompted SpaceX to delay a flight to the International Space Station on Wednesday to replace NASA’s two stuck astronauts.
From 2035, the Einstein Telescope will be able to study gravitational waves with unprecedented accuracy. For the telescope, researchers from Jena have manufactured highly sensitive sensors made entirely of glass for the first time.
Four crew members will embark on a new long-duration science expedition when they launch to the International Space Station (ISS) on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft as part of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-10 mission. While on station, the crew will engage in a wide variety of research, including materials and physical sciences experiments and biomedical research.
