The weak nuclear force is the eccentric cousin of the four forces — the one that only shakes hands with left-handed particles. That bizarre preference turns out to be absolutely critical for stars, nuclear fusion, and the existence of most matter. And neutrinos love it. There’s just one problem: neutrinos appear to only exist in one handedness, which makes no sense at all.
As NASA’s Artemis II mission completed its lunar flyby, the astronauts sent back a stunning image of the colorful Earth setting behind the moon. This breathtaking photo, called Earthset, draws inevitable comparisons with the original Earthrise photo from the Apollo 8 flight in 1968.
Every piece of electronics ever sent to Venus has been destroyed within hours of landing, cooked alive by surface temperatures hot enough to melt lead. Now a team of engineers at the University of Southern California has built a memory chip that laughs in the face of that heat, surviving temperatures hotter than molten lava and it started with a happy accident!
What if the same collisions we think of as forces of destruction were actually the spark that created life on Earth? New research published in the Journal of Marine Science and Engineering is making a compelling case that meteor impacts didn’t just reshape our planet’s surface, instead that they may have built the very cradles where life first emerged.
A crater the size of two football pitches has appeared on the Moon and for the first time, scientists have been able to watch exactly what happened. Captured by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter before and after the impact, this remarkable discovery is giving planetary scientists an unprecedented close up of one of the Solar System’s most fundamental processes. Here’s what they found.
Scientists in Japan have developed a high-resolution X-ray telescope sharp enough to distinguish an object just 3.5 mm wide from one kilometer away, by combining precision mirror-making technology with space astronomy. To test its performance, they built a first-of-its-kind evaluation system, capable of simulating starlight on the ground to measure the telescope’s sharpness before its launch on the US-Japan FOXSI sounding rocket mission. The findings, published in Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, represent a landmark achievement for Japanese X-ray astronomy and pave the way for high-resolution X-ray observations on future smaller satellites.
For decades, astronomers were only able to study the universe’s very first stars using theoretical models. Now, observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have revealed what may be the most compelling evidence to date for these ancient “Population III” stars, finding them clustered around a small companion object that formed just 400 million years after the Big Bang.
Rocket Lab has won a contract from Japanese radar satellite company iQPS for three additional Electron launches. The post Rocket Lab wins contract for three more iQPS launches appeared first on SpaceNews.
We’ve spent decades scratching the surface of Mars trying to uncover life there. But we’ve been searching a barren wasteland bombarded by radiation and bathed in toxic perchlorates. The entire time, it’s likely that it’s been too hostile to harbor extant life. So if we want a better shot at finding currently living life on Mars, we need to go underground. That is exactly the purpose of Orpheus, a proposed Mars vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) hopper mission put forth in a paper presented by Connor Bunn and Pascal Lee of the SETI Institute at the 57th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC).
Experience the Aug. 12, 2026 total solar eclipse from Spain and Iceland with festivals, spa sessions and skywatching events along the path of totality. Continue ReadingFrom spa to boat party: 10 epic events for the Aug. 12, 2026, total solar eclipse in Spain and Iceland
The Artemis 2 astronauts are back on Earth, and they’ve begun processing their historic moon mission. But it’s still tough for them to put the experience into words. Continue Reading‘The most special thing that will ever happen in my life’: Artemis 2 astronauts describe their epic moon mission
A brilliant physicist vanished in 1938, leaving behind one strange, quiet paper. It described something that shouldn’t exist: a particle that is its own antiparticle. To understand why that matters, we first need to rethink what a particle even is — and that means getting weird with chirality, the Higgs field, and the neutrino’s stubborn refusal to follow the rules.
A Falcon 9 launched a Cygnus cargo spacecraft April 11 as Northrop Grumman continues its dependence on a competitor to fly resupply missions to the International Space Station. The post Falcon 9 launches Cygnus cargo spacecraft to the ISS appeared first on SpaceNews.
On Episode 205 of This Week In Space, Rod Pyle and Tariq Malik discuss the flight of Artemis 2. Continue ReadingThis Week In Space podcast: Episode 205 — All About Artemis
Northrop Grumman’s second “Cygnus XL” cargo ship will launch toward the International Space Station on Saturday morning (April 11), and you can watch it live. Continue ReadingWatch SpaceX launch big ‘Cygnus XL’ cargo spacecraft toward the ISS today
NASA’s Artemis II mission sent four astronauts—three Americans and one Canadian—on the first lunar flyby in more than 50 years.
NASA doesn’t plan to rest on its laurels after the historic success of its Artemis 2 moon mission. Here are the agency’s ambitious plans for Earth’s nearest neighbor. Continue ReadingArtemis 3 and beyond: What’s next for NASA after Artemis 2 moon success
With Artemis II successfully completing its historic lunar mission on Friday, NASA is banking on billionaires Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk for the next step: landing astronauts on the moon.
When NASA flight director Zebulon Scoville was working a shift during the uncrewed Artemis I test flight, he realized the US space agency wasn’t consistently livestreaming the spacecraft’s journey to Earth.
Artemis II’s astronauts closed out humanity’s first lunar voyage in more than half a century with a Pacific splashdown on Friday, blazing new records near the moon with grace and joy.
