NASA astronaut Don Pettit used a camera with low light and long duration settings to capture this Jan. 29, 2025, image of the Milky Way appearing beyond Earth’s horizon.
New information is pushing Asteroid 2024 YR4 off of our front pages. Initial estimates gave it a 2.8% chance of striking Earth in 2032. Now, the European Space Agency says the chance of it striking our planet is down to a paltry 0.001%.
Launching no earlier than Wednesday, Feb. 26, NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer will help resolve an enduring mystery: Where is the moon’s water? After sharing a ride on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with Intuitive Machines’ IM-2 launch—part of NASA’s CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) initiative—the small satellite will take several months to arrive in lunar orbit.
When you look at your surrounding environment, it might seem like you’re living on a flat plane. After all, this is why you can navigate a new city using a map: a flat piece of paper that represents all the places around you. This is likely why some people in the past believed the Earth to be flat. But most people now know that is far from the truth.
When you drink a nice refreshing glass of water, do you ever think, “Gee, I’m glad that polymeric desalination membrane did its job!” Probably not, but maybe you should.
Imagine floating in space, gazing on a frozen white orb. The ball hangs in the void, lonely and gleaming in the light from its star. From pole to equator, the sphere is covered in a thick crust of ice. In orbit around the white planet is a single cratered moon.
Mars, the next frontier in space exploration, still poses many questions for scientists. The planet was once more hospitable, characterized by a warm and wet climate with liquid oceans. But today Mars is cold and dry, with most water now located below the surface. Understanding how much water is stored offers critical information for energy exploration, as well as life sustainability on the planet.
Chinese astronomers have analyzed the data from NASA’s Swift observatory, which extensively observed an outburst of the cataclysmic variable system known as GK Persei. Results of the study, published February 20 on the arXiv preprint server, shed more light on the nature of this system.
Geochemical evidence from laboratory experiments for a potential solid inner core at the center of Mars is reported in Nature Communications.
Intuitive Machines made history last year as the first private company to put a robot on the moon, although the triumph was marred by the lander tipping onto its side.
In 2007, astronomers discovered the Cosmic Horseshoe, a gravitationally lensed system of galaxies about 5.5 billion light-years away. The foreground galaxy’s mass magnifies and distorts the image of a distant background galaxy whose light has traveled for billions of years before reaching us. The foreground and background galaxies are in such perfect alignment that they create an Einstein ring.
NASA’s Lucy spacecraft has its next flyby target, the small main belt asteroid Donaldjohanson, in its sights. By blinking between images captured by Lucy on Feb. 20 and 22, this animation shows the perceived motion of Donaldjohanson relative to the background stars as the spacecraft rapidly approaches the asteroid.
High above Earth’s poles, intense electrical currents called electrojets flow through the upper atmosphere when auroras glow in the sky. These auroral electrojets push about a million amps of electrical charge around the poles every second. They can create some of the largest magnetic disturbances on the ground, and rapid changes in the currents can lead to effects such as power outages. In March, NASA plans to launch its EZIE (Electrojet Zeeman Imaging Explorer) mission to learn more about these powerful currents, in the hopes of ultimately mitigating the effects of such space weather for humans on Earth.
Seven planets grace the sky at the end of February in what’s known as a planetary parade, though some will be difficult to spot with the naked eye.
The Walker circulation, an atmospheric circulation pattern in the tropics, has accelerated in recent years, puzzling climate scientists who had anticipated the opposite. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology and the University of Tokyo have found out why by revealing the competing effects between global warming and the sea surface temperature pattern effect.
In the 1970s, images from the NASA Mariner 9 orbiter revealed water-sculpted surfaces on Mars. This settled the once-controversial question of whether water ever rippled over the red planet.
Dr. Sukanya Chakrabarti, the Pei-Ling Chan Endowed Chair in the College of Science at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH), and her team have pioneered the use of gravitational acceleration measurements of binary pulsars to help illuminate just how much dark matter there is in the Milky Way galaxy and where it resides.
A major motor for the global climate is beginning to falter: a massive system of ocean currents called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which also includes the Gulf Stream. As a new study conducted by experts at the University of Hamburg’s Cluster of Excellence for climate research CLICCS and the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology shows, a weaker AMOC could produce long-term costs amounting to several trillion euros by the year 2100.
On March 1, NASA’s Europa Clipper will streak just 550 miles (884 kilometers) above the surface of Mars for what’s known as a gravity assist—a maneuver to bend the spacecraft’s trajectory and position it for a critical leg of its long voyage to the Jupiter system. The close flyby offers a bonus opportunity for mission scientists, who will test their radar instrument and thermal imager.
An international research team led by the University of Vienna has discovered that the solar system traversed the Orion star-forming complex, a component of the Radcliffe Wave galactic structure, approximately 14 million years ago. This journey through a dense region of space could have compressed the heliosphere, the protective bubble surrounding our solar system, and increased the influx of interstellar dust, potentially influencing Earth’s climate and leaving traces in geological records.
