Science

It’s clear that Mars once gushed with water. Today, aerial views of the Red Planet’s Jezero crater (shown below) reveal that water once poured into this basin, leaving behind telltale signs of rivers, streams, and a great lake. Some three billion years ago, a vast ocean may have blanketed a great swathe of the world,...

NASA’s Voyager spacecraft zoomed by our solar system’s planets decades ago and are now traveling through interstellar space, ultimate destination unknown. Yet the final transmissions from the two deep space craft loom increasingly closer. Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, both launched in 1977, were built to last five years. They’ve now beamed back cosmic information...

Well folks, it’s still not aliens. It’s common for speeding rocks from space to blow up in our atmosphere, events called “fireballs.” In 2014, such a meteor exploded over the Pacific Ocean, somewhere near Papua New Guinea. An intrigued group of scientists led by Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb — who to the chagrin of the...

Elon Musk lost his claim as having the most powerful space-worthy rocket when NASA blasted its mega rocket to the moon in 2022. But the SpaceX founder could win back the title with his company’s next big project: Starship. Though the company was unsuccessful during its first two tests in April and November of last...

The Pentagon firmly discredited several claims that the U.S. government has covered up evidence of space aliens and extraterrestrial material following a sweeping new investigation. A persistent theme in pop culture since the 1940s has been a belief that the government, or a secret program within it, has collected alien bodies and spacecraft and is...

NASA has proposed sci-fi plans to potentially shut down a supervolcano — should one show signs of an imminent eruption. But such a geologic scheme might not ever be necessary. In new research from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University, scientists found that the most powerful scale of eruption — which emits...

Around 11,000 years ago, a giant star exploded. But its corpse remains. Astronomers used a powerful camera mounted to the National Science Foundation’s Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope in the lofty Chilean mountains to snap an extremely detailed view of the “Vela Supernova Remnant” — the leftovers of this ancient cosmic blast. It’s now a...

NASA expects the SpaceX Starship to land astronauts on the moon, as soon as 2026. The largest rocket ever built — standing 397 feet high (with its booster) and powered by a whopping 33 engines — still has a long road ahead before it’s operational. But SpaceX is making progress. The commercial space company, known...

SpaceX’s colossal Starship reached orbital speed for the first time as well as demonstrated a first step toward being able to refuel in space, before the company ultimately lost the ship on Thursday. No injuries or property damages were immediately known. Starship, a nearly 400-foot-tall, super-heavy-lift rocket and spacecraft, took off at about 8:25 a.m....

In 1979, Alan Cummings, a scientist working on NASA’s unprecedented Voyager mission, entered a Caltech room in Pasadena, California, and saw an unusual, alien world projected on a screen. The brand-new image, just beamed back from space, revealed a place like no other ever seen. It was a moon teeming with vibrant volcanoes. Cummings, a...