Space Exploration

Pull out your red-and-blue 3D glasses: Ingenuity’s latest, ground-hugging flight has delivered an anaglyph 3D tableau of the Martian landscape. Its mission was to take color images of a specific geological target: a 30-foot hunk of craggy orange rock that the Perseverance team has nicknamed “Faillefeu,” after a medieval abbey …

Who doesn’t love gigantic, ancient volcanoes? Mars has a ton of volcanoes that come in sizes from huge to ridiculous. Today we learn that NASA scientists have uncovered evidence of explosive supervolcanoes in Arabia Terra, a battered upland region that we think is one of the oldest terrains on the …

Boeing will miss its Starliner launch window, the company has confirmed after a week of uncertainty. Four of the 13 stuck valves that delayed the OFT-2 launch last week are still not working, so Boeing and NASA have decided to unstack the spacecraft and rocket. Starliner will go back to …

  NASA has been working on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) for the better part of two decades, and it’s almost ready for launch. When operating in space, the JWST will be the most powerful telescope ever built, but it’ll all be for naught if the giant segmented mirror …

NASA’s Perseverance rover is focusing its science instruments on rocks that lay on the floor of Jezero Crater, which is located on the western edge of Isidis Planitia, a giant impact basin just north of the Martian equator. Perseverance used its dual-camera Mastcam-Z imager to capture this (enhanced) image of …

  Mars is shaking, and we’d never know were it not for the trailblazing InSight lander. This mission touched down on the red planet in 2018, making history by deploying the first and only seismometer on another planet. NASA has been listening for rumbles ever since, and it just heard …

  Humanity has come a long way in understanding the universe. We’ve got a physical framework that mostly matches our observations, and new technologies have allowed us to analyze the Big Bang and take photos of black holes. But the hypothetical EmDrive rocket engine threatened to upend what we knew …

  The in-development Starship rocket is key to SpaceX’s future plans, from lunar missions to Mars colonization. Elon Musk’s spaceflight company has been open with its Starship testing, even with the results haven’t been flattering. In the most recent test, the Starship SN11 reached an altitude of about eight kilometers, …

A novel theory proposed by planetary scientists from Caltech and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory challenges the current thinking that the saltwater global ocean of Enceladus, the sixth largest moon of Saturn, is homogenous. Enceladus’ tiger stripes are known to be spewing ice from the moon’s icy interior into space, creating …

  We’ve all been laser-focused on Mars as a site for future human outposts, but let’s not forget about the Moon. It’s only marginally less habitable than Mars right now, and it’s a lot closer. Thanks to radiation and temperature variation, however, the safest place for a long-term human presence …