We have discovered the oldest meteorite impact crater on Earth, in the very heart of the Pilbara region of Western Australia. The crater formed more than 3.5 billion years ago, making it the oldest known by more than a billion years. Our discovery is published today in Nature Communications.
Landing a spacecraft on the moon has long been a series of hits and misses.
This week, based on a genetic study, researchers issued a recommendation that bison in Yellowstone National Park should be treated as one large, interbreeding herd. Physicists proposed a new framework that derives gravity from quantum relative entropy, with implications for the past and future evolution of the universe. And a new fossil indicates that an early human relative walked upright, similarly to modern humans.
Intuitive Machines’ second moon mission ended in disappointment on Friday after the US company confirmed that its spacecraft had tipped over and was unable to recharge its solar-powered batteries—mirroring its first attempt last year.
Are subterranean lifeforms viable on Mars? A new interpretation of Martian seismic data by scientists Ikuo Katayama of Hiroshima University and Yuya Akamatsu of Research Institute for Marine Geodynamics suggests the presence of water below the surface of Mars. “If liquid water exists on Mars,” Katayama says, “the presence of microbial activity” is possible.
High-resolution near-infrared light captured by the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope shows extraordinary new detail and structure in Lynds 483 (L483). Two actively forming stars are responsible for the shimmering ejections of gas and dust that gleam in orange, blue, and purple in this representative color image.
NASA and the Italian Space Agency made history on March 3 when the Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment (LuGRE) became the first technology demonstration to acquire and track Earth-based navigation signals on the moon’s surface.
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image of a vibrant spiral galaxy called NGC 5042 resides about 48 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Hydra (the water snake). The galaxy nicely fills the frame of this Hubble image, while a single, foreground star from the Milky Way shines with cross-shaped diffraction spikes near the galaxy’s edge toward the top, center of the image.
A “classification” is when a volunteer or citizen scientist finishes marking up or sorting one image or other piece of data. Each classification done by volunteers for the Redshift Wrangler project tells us something about the distance and age of a far-away galaxy, bringing us one step closer to understanding how galaxies evolve. These volunteers have met a major milestone: 200,000 classifications completed.
Technicians with ESA (European Space Agency) and Airbus installed the four solar array wings on NASA’s Orion spacecraft for Artemis II on March 3. The solar array wings, attached to the service module, deploy after Orion reaches space to power the spacecraft.
A private lunar lander is no longer working after landing sideways in a crater near the moon’s south pole and its mission is over, officials said Friday.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX on Thursday once again lost the upper stage of its massive Starship rocket in a fiery explosion, even as the booster was successfully caught in its orbital test—a near replay of the previous attempt.
Qi Zhang, a doctoral student at the Swedish Institute of Space Physics and Umeå University, explores in her doctoral thesis the interaction between Mars and the stream of charged particles from the sun, the solar wind. Her research provides new insights for understanding how the atmosphere of Mars has evolved over time.
Nearly two months after an explosion sent flaming debris raining down on the Turks and Caicos, SpaceX launched another mammoth Starship rocket on Thursday, but lost contact minutes into the test flight as the spacecraft came tumbling down and broke apart.
A privately owned lunar lander touched down on the moon with a drill, drone and rovers for NASA and other customers Thursday, but quickly ran into trouble and may have fallen over.
A recent study published in the Journal of Hydrology has shed light on the time-lag effects of meteorological elements and atmospheric signals on extreme precipitation (EP) indices in the Tienshan Mountains of Central Asia (TMCA).
Astronomers have discovered strong evidence for the closest supermassive black hole outside of the Milky Way galaxy. This giant black hole is located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of the nearest galactic neighbors to our own.
A privately owned lunar lander touched down on the moon Thursday, but as the minutes dragged on, flight controllers could not confirm its condition or whether it was even upright near the south pole.
Interstellar material has been discovered in our solar system, but researchers continue to hunt for where it came from and how it got here. A new study led by Western astrophysicists Cole Gregg and Paul Wiegert recommends Alpha Centauri—the next closest solar system to ours—is a great place to start, highlighting how and why it’s a prime target.
The weak La Niña event that emerged in December 2024 is likely to be short-lived, according to the latest World Meteorological Organization (WMO) update.
