Space Exploration

Plastic is everywhere, and rocks are no exception. A team of geologists studying a remote island off the coast of Brazil have found that rocks are forming out of plastic waste, renewing the scientific community’s sense of urgency surrounding plastic pollution. Researchers typically flock to Trindade Island to study its …

Artist’s rendering of a Solsys system that mechanically sorts regolith before dissolving nutrients into water. (Image: Solsys/ESA)The European Space Agency (ESA) announced Wednesday that it’s launched a new project that will help determine the feasibility of farming on the moon. The project, “Enabling Lunar In-Situ Agriculture by Producing Fertilizer from …

Time is running out for NASA’s InSight lander. On the heels of yet another important seismic discovery, the lander’s power reserves have dropped to critical levels. InSight, which has been on Mars since late 2018, beamed home what may be its final image, featuring the arid surface and its own …

Mars is the only known planet aside from Earth that has polar ice caps, but unlike Earth, the ice on Mars is mostly of the “dry” carbon dioxide variety. Naturally, there’s great interest in better understanding the Martian polar regions. A new analysis of Mars using data from NASA’s Mars …

Many of the places NASA wants to send future crewed and uncrewed missions have an atmosphere, which is problematic if you want your payload to reach the surface in one piece. Entering an atmosphere from space, even a thin one like you’d find on Mars, requires a heat shield. NASA …

Space telescopes offer the power to look deep into the night sky, and with it, the power to look back in time. In fact, looking back into the early Universe is one of the James Webb space telescope’s primary mission objectives. Now, a new analysis of deep-field images from Webb …

  There is no longer any doubt that the universe is teeming with planets — NASA recently announced that the total number of known exoplanets has crossed 5,000, and we’ve only just begun our search of the heavens. Upcoming projects leveraging the shiny new James Webb Space Telescope will certainly …

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has set innumerable records during its three decades of service, but the latest might be its most impressive feat yet. Researchers from Johns Hopkins University and the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) used Hubble to spot the most distant star ever, a whopping 12.8 billion light …

SpaceX is the only entity with the capability to fly astronauts to and from the International Space Station (ISS), but it’s wrapping up production of the vessel that makes it possible. Following a Reuters report, Elon Musk’s spaceflight company has confirmed that it will cap its fleet of Crew Dragon …

You might think our local gas giants are extreme — Jupiter with its gaggle of moons, and Saturn with the iconic rings, but they’re nothing compared to WASP-121b. This exoplanet caught the attention of astronomers a few years back when they realized its atmosphere was hot enough to bleed metal. …