A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off on the Starlink 10-38 mission from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station as seen from the shoreside in Cocoa Beach, Florida, on May 1, 2026. Image: John Pisani/Spaceflight Now
Update May 1, 3:10 p.m. EDT (1910 UTC): SpaceX confirms deployment of the 29 Starlink satellites.
May's full moon rises as flowers bloom across the northern hemisphere.
Venus hangs in place in the western twilight while Aldebaran and the Pleiades continue their downward slide behind it. And if Venus is the Evening Star, then bright Jupiter, high to its upper left, counts as the False Evening Star.
The Copernicus Sentinel-1D satellite, launched last November, is now fully operational after successfully completing its critical in-orbit commissioning phase.
Image: Captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission on 21 April 2026, this image shows a double bloom in the Netherlands: an array of vibrant colours in the tulip fields as well as the blue-greenish swirls of phytoplankton in the North Sea.
You’re on the fourth human mission to Mars, and you’re told the Odyssey spacecraft designed to take you there will be the smoothest ride you’ll ever take. It features a newly christened electric propulsion engine which was in the late stages of testing during the first three missions. The mission starts and the spacecraft travels at a crawl, and you wonder if it’s broken. A week goes by and you’re now traveling at more than 400,000 kilometers (250,000 miles) per hour, and your mind is blown as to how fast you’re going, how quickly that happened, and that this mission might be more awesome than you thought.
Russia launched its Soyuz 5 medium-lift rocket for the first time ever on Thursday (April 30), and things apparently went well.
Artemis 3 slips to late 2027 as Starship and Blue Moon lag, delaying NASA’s lunar return timeline and jeopardizing a 2028 moon landing.
For the past decade, astronomers thought they had a reasonable answer to that question. Around stars like our Sun, the two dominant planet types are sub-Neptunes, worlds resembling a shrunken Neptune, with thick gaseous envelopes and super-Earths, rocky planets up to ten times the mass of our own. Surveys had found them everywhere, orbiting star after star, and the assumption quietly took hold that these planets must be equally widespread across the Galaxy as a whole.
Studying the thing you can never step outside of and look back at is the fundamental problem facing every cosmologist who has ever looked up at the night sky. The Universe is not a laboratory you can peer into from above, it’s the thing you are already inside. The only way to truly test your ideas about how it works is to build a copy of it, run the clock forward from the Big Bang, and see if what emerges matches what your telescopes are actually telling you.
For most of human spaceflight history, the go to for communications has been radio waves, a technology that has served us remarkably well, but one that is beginning to show its age. When NASA's Artemis II mission carried four astronauts around the Moon in April the year, engineers quietly tested a laser communications terminal that could one day rewrite the rules of deep space exploration.
The United States Space Force has created a new program to develop space-based missile interceptors, with the goal of being able to demonstrate their capability by 2028.
Evidence suggests that Venus is still volcanically active, and new data about a big eruption in Hawaii a few years ago could help scientists find out for sure.
Our Sun is a bit of an outlier in the general stellar population. We typically think of stars as being solitary wanderers throughout the galaxy. But roughly half of Sun-like stars are locked in with more than one companion star. If there are two, it’s known as a “binary” system, but in many cases there are even more stars all collectively tied together by gravity. Astronomers have long debated why this happens, and a new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv from Ryan Sponzilli, a graduate student at the University of Illinois, makes an argument for a mechanism known as disk fragmentation.
'When we started visualizing this world, we wanted to do right by the fans'
Wispy nebula clouds can be seen reflecting the blue-white light of the Pleiades in the stunning amateur photo.
SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket flew for the first time in 18 months Wednesday (April 29), and a sharp-eyed satellite was watching.
Artemis 2's Orion capsule has returned to its Florida launch site, just three weeks after carrying four astronauts on a historic journey around the moon's far side.
The most recent interstellar visitor was crisscrossing our galaxy for some 10 to 12 billion years before it came near the Sun.
There are tens of thousands of Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) that represent some of the most easily accessible resources in the solar system. If we can get to them at least. Planning trajectories to rendezvous with these miniature worlds is notoriously difficult, and requires a massive amount of computational power to calculate. But a new paper from astrodynamicist Alessandro Beolchi of Khalifa University of Science and Technology and his co-authors offers a much less computationally intensive way to find these trajectories, and has the added bonus of finding the much less energy-intensive paths to boot.
Early May is a good time to watch for a powerful yet often elusive meteor shower, the annual Eta Aquariids.
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