Science

Long ago, a vigorous river filled an expansive Martian lake. Now, a NASA robot has rumbled through this ghost of Mars’ water-rich past. In early June, the space agency’s Perseverance rover drove across the Neretva Vallis river channel, now a wide, dried-up waterway. The Mars robot, en route to examine new areas of interest, looked...

If looking at this Mars vista conjures up childhood memories of the song, “One of these things is not like the others,” NASA scientists are right there with you.  Perseverance, a car-size lab on six wheels, traveled into the Red Planet’s Neretva Vallis last week. Though this region may look like a barren desert, it...

On a visit to The Colbert Report in 2013, the eponymous host asked NASA scientist Ed Stone if he ever got annoyed that the agency’s astronauts received all the parades and fanfare, while researchers toiled behind the scenes. “No,” Stone responded, “we’re having too much fun.” Indeed, Stone served as the head scientist for the...

Giant asteroids slammed into each other in a far-off solar system — kicking up 100,000 times more dust than the dinosaur-killing impact on Earth. This violent deep space event occurred in Beta Pictoris, a system 63 light-years away. Beta Pictoris is known to have two gas giant planets, and is seen as a place where...

Mars just got a blast of radiation. The sun is at the peak of its 11-year solar cycle, which means it’s more likely to emit bursts of energy and particles into space. Recent solar storms have stoked glorious aurora on Earth, and on May 20 the strongest class of solar flare — an explosion of...

Apparently, SpaceX had some well-placed cameras bobbing in the Gulf of Mexico to capture an unprecedented aspect of its Starship test last week.  Billionaire Elon Musk‘s company recently released a video of its Super Heavy booster descending through the air during the rocket system’s fourth uncrewed test flight on Thursday, June 6.  Over 25 seconds,...

At a federal research lab located at 11,135 feet (3,397 meters) of elevation, U.S. scientists measured a consequential record. Due to its remoteness in the Pacific Ocean, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Mauna Loa Atmospheric Baseline Observatory, located high up in Hawaii, is tasked with taking untainted, daily atmospheric measurements. On June 6, NOAA...

NASA suspects our galaxy may teem with trillions of planets. Yet even with the powerful James Webb Space Telescope, it’s profoundly hard to find a handful of worlds that may harbor even hints of life. The prospect of using Webb, which can peer into the atmospheres of planets beyond our solar system (exoplanets) to make...

SpaceX’s Starship showed stamina on Thursday, flying longer than ever before during its blistering return to Earth and even performed a key flip and landing burn before hitting water.  No injuries or property damages from falling debris were immediately known after the test. Starship, a 400-foot-tall, super-heavy-lift rocket and spaceship, blasted off at 7:50 a.m....

They’re not after you. And they don’t “parachute” from the sky. Periodically, people and headlines on the internet have expressed concern about the spread of the invasive Joro spider, a big, striking arachnid that almost certainly hitched a ride to the U.S. aboard a shipping container, as many invasive species do. Since 2013, the palm-sized...