Science

Apparently, Boeing’s troubled spaceship isn’t done giving NASA some brain teasers while it’s still in space.  Starliner’s commander, astronaut Barry “Butch” Wilmore, asked Houston mission control on Saturday why the test capsule had started emitting strange noises from a speaker. At first the sounds weren’t audible, then Wilmore, 61, captured a better recording: an unnerving,...

With Boeing’s troubled spaceship deemed too risky to bring its crew home from space, NASA has bumped the two female astronauts set for the next International Space Station rotation to free up seats.  Zena Cardman, who would have been the SpaceX Crew-9 commander, and Stephanie Wilson were cut from the upcoming crew. NASA astronaut Nick...

As the Perseverance rover rumbled over Mars terrain scoping out rocks, seven companies spent the summer trying to figure out how to help NASA bring its samples back to Earth.  The U.S. space agency’s mission to return bits of rock, dust, and even air from the Red Planet, known as Mars Sample Return, is in...

Some 480 million miles away, an ocean — harboring perhaps twice the water of Earth’s seas — sloshes beneath the icy surface of Europa. NASA’s going there. This moon of Jupiter has long intrigued planetary scientists, as a number of missions have swooped by the world’s cracked, icy crust. Now, for the first time, a...

Imagine not eating for half a year. For the Alaskan bears of Katmai National Park and Preserve, the long winter famine always looms large. So they eat. And eat. And attempt to grow profoundly fat, because they must subsist off their fat stores for months. That’s why, in this wild northern realm, a fat bear...

Scientists discovered a giant underwater mountain. And it’s teeming with deep sea life. An endeavor aboard the Falkor (too) — a 363-foot (111-meter) research vessel operated by the Schmidt Ocean Institute — has returned vivid imagery from its latest exploration mission around a variety of seamounts, including in the Nazca Ridge, located some 900 miles...

To slingshot through the solar system, a spacecraft zipped between Earth and the moon. The European Space Agency has released a time-lapse video of the endeavor, which is part of a trajectory to propel its Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) spacecraft to Jupiter. “Timelapse! Volume up, sit back and enjoy #ESAJuice’s lunar-Earth flyby in all...

Sometimes, planets go rogue. Scientists used the powerful James Webb Space Telescope to spot six of these rogue objects, which move through the cosmos untethered from any solar system. They’re a little bigger than the gas giant Jupiter, and the discovery suggests these worlds formed similar to the way stars form — rather than how...

SpaceX is about to send its human spacecraft farther than ever before in space, and it will do it with a crew of four civilians.  During the five-day Polaris Dawn mission, the Crew Dragon capsule is expected to reach its highest-ever orbit of 435 miles above Earth. That’s about 185 miles beyond the International Space...

Have you ever had an eight-day road trip turn into an eight-month excursion? Nope? Well, consider yourself fortunate that you’re not one of the astronauts currently stranded in space. The two astronauts, Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, who blasted to the International Space Station (ISS) in a Boeing Starliner are now set to remain there...