Space News & Blog Articles

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Meet Andrea Patassa—test pilot, aviator, passionate outdoor adventurer, and Member of ESA’s Astronaut Reserve. 

The emission nebula, known as Sh2-284, is an immense region of gas and dust that fuels new star formation. It lacks elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, much like the environment of the early universe.

Image: Inner space engineering

The Mars water debate continues. A team of scientists suggests vast oceans of water may not be locked within the Red Planet's crust, despite InSight lander data.

Image: The Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission takes us over the Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains.

Astronomers have discovered filaments of matter swirling tornado-like around the heart of the Milky Way, home to the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A*.

It’s looking more and more as if dark energy, the mysterious factor that scientists say is behind the accelerating expansion of the universe, isn’t as constant as they once thought. The latest findings from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, or DESI, don’t quite yet come up to the level of a confirmed discovery, but they’re leading scientists to rethink their views on the evolution of the universe — and how it might end.

Somehow, we all know how a warp drive works. You're in your spaceship and you need to get to another star. So you press a button or flip a switch or pull a lever and your ship just goes fast. Like really fast. Faster than the speed of light. Fast enough that you can get to your next destination by the end of the next commercial break.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket stands in launch position at Space Launch Complex 4 East (SLC-4E) at Vandenberg Space Force Base ahead of the launch of the NROL-57 mission. Image: SpaceX

The National Reconnaissance Office launched its eighth batch of satellites to support its proliferated architecture constellation. The mission includes a number of notable milestones for SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket program, including a record-fast turnaround time for its booster.

Three giants in the camera industry — but which one has the best astrophotography features for you?

A pod of bottlenose dolphins seemingly took interest in the capsule that dropped out of the sky, circling and surfacing as SpaceX team members worked to recover their spacecraft.

Welcome back to our five-part examination of Webb's Cycle 4 General Observations program. In the first and second installments, we examined how some of Webb's 8,500 hours of prime observing time this cycle will be dedicated to exoplanet characterization, the study of galaxies at "Cosmic Dawn," and the period known as "Cosmic Noon." Today, we'll look at programs that will leverage Webb's unique abilities to study stellar populations and the interstellar medium in galaxies.

SpaceX set a new rocket-reuse record early Friday morning (March 21) when it launched a batch of spy satellites for the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office.

The surfaces of the Moon, Mercury, and Mars are easily visible and are littered with crater impacts. Earth has been subjected to the same bombardment, but geological activity and weathering have eliminated most of the craters. The ones that remain are mostly only faint outlines or remnants. However, researchers in Australia have succeeded in finding what they think is the oldest impact crater on Earth.

The James Webb Space Telescope has detected water vapor and thick clouds on LTT 9779 b, an ultra-hot Neptune locked in a blistering 19-hour orbit.

The Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), currently under construction in northern Chile, will give us a better view of the Milky Way than any ground-based telescope before it. It's difficult to overstate how transformative it will be. The ELT's primary mirror array will have an effective diameter of 39 meters. It will gather more light than previous telescopes by an order of magnitude, and it will give us images 16 times sharper than the Hubble Space Telescope. It's scheduled to come online in 2028, and the results could start flooding in literally overnight, as a recent study shows.

One of the Holy Grails in cosmology is a look back at the earliest epochs of cosmic history. Unfortunately, the Universe's first few hundred thousand years are shrouded in an impenetrable fog. So far, nobody's been able to see past it to the Big Bang. As it turns out, astronomers are chipping away at that cosmic fog by using data from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) in Chile.

Two nearby explosive massive star deaths, or supernovas, may have triggered mass extinction events in Earth's distant past, new research suggests.

View the March 29 partial solar eclipse safely with these certified solar viewing glasses for under $9.

ESA's Strategy 2040

As civilisations become more and more advanced, their power needs also increase. It’s likely that an advanced civilisation might need so much power that they enclose their host star in solar energy collecting satellites. These Dyson Swarms will trap heat so any planets within the sphere are likely to experience a temperature increase. A new paper explores this and concludes that a complete Dyson swarm outside the orbit of the Earth would raise our temperature by 140 K!