Science

There are volcanoes erupting hundreds of millions of miles beyond Earth. And a NASA spacecraft is watching it happen. The space agency’s Juno probe, which has orbited Jupiter since 2016, swooped by the gas giant’s volcanic moon Io last week, its last close planned flyby. The craft captured a world teeming with volcanoes, which you...

The ground is moving. It’s a creeping movement, but a momentous one. Some 200 million years ago, a single, extraordinary supercontinent called Pangea dominated Earth. Ultimately, landmasses ruptured and pulled apart, creating the world we see today. Yet the continents never ceased drifting. And in some 250 million years’ time, computer simulations suggest that a...

Any day now, people will look up and see a distant star exploding.  Though Earthlings will be able to observe this celestial event as if it just happened, the cataclysmic blast occurred some 3,000 years ago, perhaps in the time of Solomon, the king who built the first temple in Jerusalem. Through the Iron Age,...

Folks, it’s happening. NASA announced its unprecedented Dragonfly mission — which will fly a car-sized craft with eight spinning rotors around Saturn’s moon Titan — is confirmed for flight. The mission, in advanced stages of its design and fabrication, has an approved budget, ride (a heavy-lift rocket), and launch date in 2028. “Dragonfly is a...

NASA has already spotted a diversity of rocky, Earth-like worlds in the cosmos. But unlike our verdant planet, many of these worlds may flourish with purple life — if life exists out there, that is. It’s easy to imagine organisms elsewhere resembling the colors of trees, algae, grasses, and beyond that dominate our Earthly reality....

NASA’s Juno spacecraft recently swooped by the most powerful volcano in our solar system, on the most volcanic world known to exist. The space agency captured detailed views of the over 127-mile (200-kilometer) wide volcano, which has created an expansive lava lake. It’s a volcano on Jupiter’s moon Io, called Loki Patera. “It’s absolutely stunning,...

Bless Pluto’s heart.  When NASA‘s New Horizons spacecraft first snapped photos of an unusual heart-shaped scar on Pluto in 2015, the new view bolstered theories that the frigid world harbored an underground ocean.  Scientists thought the left side of the bright white heart, or Tombaugh Regio, formed after another planetary body crashed into it. The...

NASA’s exploration robots have rumbled around Mars, swooped around Saturn, and flown well beyond the planets, into interstellar space. But the space agency’s engineers often direct their machines to peer back at the vivid blue dot in the distance. “During almost every mission we turn around and take a picture back home,” NASA‘s former chief...

Our farthest-away spacecraft isn’t finished yet. NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft, at over 15 billion miles away and hurtling ever-deeper into the cosmos, beamed back crucial data about its health for the first time in five months. NASA released a photo of mission engineers celebrating the success of their software patch with raised arms and wide...

NASA hoped its Ingenuity helicopter would fly at least once. It took flight 72 times. The historic craft — the first to ever make a powered, controlled flight on another planet — flew distances as far as 2,315 feet across Mars’ Jezero Crater, a basin that once teemed with water, likely creating a lake some...