On October 14th, 2024, NASA’s Europa Clipper mission launched atop a Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It will spend the next few years traveling 2.9 billion km (1.8 billion mi) to reach Jupiter’s moon Europa, arriving in April 2030. Once it arrives in the system, the … Read more
The colored dots represent different superstructures out to 800 million light-years (250 megaparsecs) from Earth. The red dots denote Quipu, the largest structure in the universe. Yellow is Sculptor-Pegasus superstructure, green is Serpens-Corona Borealis, purple is Hercules and blue is Shapley. Image via Böhringer et al. Astronomy and Astrophysics, 2025. Used with permission. Quipu is … Read more
Despite being a hellish world, the hot, cloud-enveloped world Venus is a tantalizing target for scientists eager to learn more about its history, evolution and present state. At the forefront of tackling what that puzzling place can teach us is the Venus Exploration Analysis Group (VExAG), a community-based forum to help NASA shape and advance … Read more
The mere mention of Leonardo da Vinci evokes genius. We know him as a polymath whose interests spanned astronomy, geology, hydrology, engineering and physics. As a painter, his Mona Lisa and Last Supper are considered works of mastery. Yet one great achievement that frequently goes unrecognised is his studies of human anatomy. More than 500 … Read more
Our Moon continues to surprise us with amazing features. Scientists recently shared new information about two canyons that branch out from a major lunar impact. The site is the Schrödinger basin near the Moon’s South Pole. It formed when an asteroid or possibly even a leftover planetesimal slammed into the surface. It took only minutes … Read more
How would detecting methane help astronomers identify if exoplanets, or even exomoons, have life as we know it, or even as we don’t know it? This is what a recent study published in The Astronomical Journal hopes to address as a team of researchers led by the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center investigated how a … Read more
In the more than 60 years since the Space Age began, humans have sent more than 6,740 rockets to space. According to the ESA’s Space Debris Office, this has resulted in 56,450 objects in orbit; about 36,860 of these objects are regularly tracked and maintained in a catalog, while 10,200 are still functioning. The rest … Read more
Vast Space is taking big steps toward putting the first commercial space station in orbit. The California-based startup recently completed a major testing milestone for the qualification vessel of its upcoming Haven-1 station, a benchmark Vast also used to reevaluate the launch date for the company’s first flight-ready module. “With the completion of our primary … Read more
If lunar tectonic activity is more prevalent than thought, the landing gear design for the tall Starship HLS may need to be broader and more stable. Credit: NASA More than 3 billion years ago, when the Moon’s volcanic mare (the dark lunar “seas”) were formed, the Moon was rife with tectonic activity and moonquakes that … Read more
By observing tiny ripples in spacetime called “gravitational waves” that propagate away from colliding black holes, scientists could reveal hidden asymmetries in the universe. The team behind new research on the topic suggests that measuring whether gravitational waves from black hole mergers are right- or left-handed can tell us if the Cosmological Principle — an … Read more