Science

As the International Space Station nears its retirement in 2030, NASA and its contractors are working full tilt on a new lab that will be whizzing through space much farther from Earth. Right now, at a facility in Turin, Italy, engineers are stress-testing the core module for Gateway, a lunar space station designed to provide...

The International Space Station, weighing in at nearly 1 million pounds, will meet a dramatic death. After breaking apart and largely vaporizing while falling through Earth’s atmosphere, the leftover charred chunks will plunge into a remote ocean, and then sink to the seafloor. The grand deorbit of the aging laboratory will happen around 2030, and...

Missy Elliott can officially boast having the first ever hip-hop song beamed into space. Add it to the shelf with all those Grammys, Hall of Fame inductions, and tens of millions of record sales, huh? Lyrics from the queen of rap’s “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)” — her iconic debut solo single from 1997 —...

A fortified NASA spacecraft has reached nearly 400,000 mph — again. That’s the fastest a human-built machine has ever flown. And it will keep picking up speed. The U.S. space agency recently announced its Parker Solar Probe — the first mission to fly through the sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona — matched its own speed...

SpaceX can’t launch its busiest rockets following a rare mishap during a routine flight late Thursday night. The flight was supposed to place 20 new Starlink satellites into space, which provide internet access to some of the most remote places in the world. One of the company’s Falcon 9 rockets experienced a failure, after lifting off from...

Two NASA astronauts who flew the new spaceship Starliner in June have had an unexpected extended stay in space. While sensational headlines have referred to the test pilots as “stuck” or “stranded,” Boeing — the company that built the capsule — has assured the public that the crew are not in any danger and don’t...

When NASA‘s Hubble Space Telescope observed an odd couple of galaxies about a decade ago, they looked like a penguin and egg, with plenty of breathing room between them.  But in the James Webb Space Telescope‘s infrared vision, the two suddenly appear joined in space. What looked like a reddish-brown back vein running down the...

Astronomers have homed in on a world they believe might have just the right conditions for a thick atmosphere and an ocean half the size of the Atlantic.  The exoplanet — a world orbiting a star other than the sun — is LHS 1140 b, and it’s about 48 light-years away from Earth, in the...

Astronaut Matthew Dominick was going about 17,500 mph or so above Earth when he peered out his window and saw this remarkable view. Dominick, who launched to the International Space Station in March as commander of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-8 mission, pulled out his camera and snapped the above photo. Taken on the Fourth of July,...

When NASA‘s Juno orbiter swooped close to a Jupiter moon, it saw a pair of volcanic plumes spurting material into space, something the robotic spacecraft hadn’t captured before.  The plumes rise high above Io, Jupiter’s third-largest moon. It’s the most volcanically active world in our solar system, where astronomers believe hundreds of volcanoes spew fountains...