Space Exploration

ESA’s Mars Express orbiter has spotted three overlapping craters in Noachis Terra, an extensive landmass in the southern hemisphere of Mars. This image shows a triple crater in Noachis Terra, Mars. The largest crater measures 45 km across, and the smallest 28 km. There are also signs of other sizeable …

  SpaceX has been launching batches of Starlink internet satellites on a regular basis since May 2019, and there are now hundreds of nodes in its megaconstellation. That provides sufficient coverage that SpaceX has started rolling out a beta test of its new satellite internet service. According to data from …

NASA’s Juno spacecraft has been in orbit around Jupiter since 2016. One of its instruments is the ultraviolet spectrograph (UVS), which is primarily used to make ultraviolet images of Jupiter’s auroras. During the first four years of the mission, the UVS instrument has observed 11 transient bright flashes. These flashes …

On October 28, 2020, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft successfully stowed its Sample Return Capsule (SRC) with a sample of surface material from the near-Earth asteroid Bennu. This image shows OSIRIS-REx’s collector head hovering over the Sample Return Capsule after the Touch-And-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism arm moved it into the proper position …

  Astronomers have identified more than 4,000 exoplanets orbiting other stars but just a few “rogue planets” wandering the galaxy without a star to call home. A new study claims to have spotted one of these worlds, and it may be a small, rocky world like Earth. If confirmed, the …

  Spooky sounds are a mainstay of Halloween, but there’s no sound in space. That doesn’t mean it’s not scary, though. Black holes can vacuum up light and spaghettify matter, but it turns out they have a Halloween vibe if you give them a listen. NASA’s latest data release turns …

  Earth has been bombarded by space rocks throughout its history, but we’re lucky no large ones have slammed into the planet lately. Astronomers keep a careful watch on the skies, hoping to spot potential impactors far enough in advance that we can do something about it, and one of …

An international team of researchers has found extraterrestrial hydrocarbons, sulfurized and nitrogen-containing compounds in the Hamburg meteorite, which landed on frozen lakes in Michigan in 2018. A fragment of the Hamburg meteorite found on Strawberry Lake near Hamburg, Michigan, the United States. Image credit: Heck et al., doi: 10.1111/maps.13584. The …

Using high sensitivity spectroscopic observations from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), astronomers have detected a small cyclic molecule called cyclopropenylidene (C3H2) in the atmosphere of Titan, the largest moon of Saturn. This composite image shows an infrared view of Titan. In this image blue represents wavelengths centered at 1.3 …

  Researchers confirmed a long-standing theory that there was water ice on the moon, according to a pair of studies published in Nature Astronomy. While water on the moon has been suspected for several decades, and multiple lunar missions have gathered data that pointed to its presence, definitive proof had …