Space News & Blog Articles

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ESA’s state-of-the-art Biomass  mission has been designed to shed new light on the health and dynamics of the world’s forests, revealing how they are changing over time and, critically, enhancing our understanding of their role in the global carbon cycle. It is the first satellite to carry a fully polarimetric P-band synthetic aperture radar for interferometric imaging. Thanks to the long wavelength of P-band, around 70 cm, the radar signal can slice through the forest canopy and whole forest layer to measure the ‘biomass’, meaning the woody trunks, branches and stems, which is where trees store most of their carbon.

When China's DRO-A and B satellites were launched, their rocket failed to deliver them to their planned orbit. Even worse, the satellites were spinning out of control, unable to properly charge their solar panels. Engineers realized that there was still a way to put them on course again. They executed a series of gravitational slingshots over 123 days, using the Sun, Earth, and the Moon to raise the spacecraft's orbits and put them into their proper trajectory.

The weather gets a little wild and weird on Jupiter. How wild? Spacecraft instruments have measured strong winds, tracked fierce lightning, and found huge methane plume storms rising from deep beneath the clouds. How weird? Think: mushballs raining down like hailstones. They're made of ammonia and water encased in a water ice shell. According to planetary scientists, these mushballs plunge through the Jovian atmosphere. What's more, they probably form on the other gas and ice giants, too.

The evidence is building that the surface of Mars was warm and wet for its early history. But what form did this water take? In a new study, geologists propose that Mars has very similar features to places like Utah on Earth, where precipitation from snow or rain formed the patterns of valleys and headwaters that have been mapped from space. Some of these features would require meters deep of flowing water to deposit large boulders.

Spacewalking astronauts repaired and upgraded the famed Hubble Telescope during five missions from 1993 to 2009. Here's a summary of these epic servicing efforts.

Check out this fun way to embrace Earth Day and NASA's 60 years of planetary observation.

Let’s turn the sun into a telescope. In fact, we don’t have to do any work – we just have to be in the right spot.

Studying the Sun is becoming increasingly important as more and more of our infrastructure moves off the surface and into the realm where coronal mass ejections and the solar wind can begin to affect them. Scientists recognize this problem and have started devoting more and more resources to studying the Sun, specifically the "space weather" that might affect us. Recently, one of the newest members of the group of satellites focused on studying the Sun hit a milestone when the Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH) mission took on its first light.

A new microscope just arrived at the International Space Station to help study life's adaptability under extreme conditions using an innovative imaging technique.

Planetary scientists have plenty of theories about Mars and its environmental past. Two of the most widely accepted are that there was a carbon dioxide atmosphere and, at one point, liquid water on Mars' surface. However, this theory has a glaring problem: Where should the rocks have formed from the interactions between carbon dioxide and water? According to a new paper by scientists at several NASA facilities using data collected by the rover Curiosity, the answer is right under the rover's metaphorical feet.

Scientists have long known that Saturn's largest moon, Titan, hosts rivers and seas of liquid methane. But it's strangely lacking in river deltas, a new study suggests.

NASA engineers tested the functionality of Orion's forward bay cover, which is the last component of the spacecraft that must be ejected before parachutes deploy to land.

The next Fortnite x Star Wars collaboration will bring new content to Epic Games' hit online multiplayer game, including starfighters, Darth Jar Jar, and a new live event.

Using the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have discovered "smoking gun" evidence of a hidden feeding supermassive black hole in a distant spiral galaxy.

The exoplanet K2-18b is generating headlines because researchers announced what could be evidence of life on the planet. The JWST detected a pair of atmospheric chemicals that on Earth are produced by living organisms. The astronomers responsible for the results are quick to remind everyone that they have not found life, only chemicals that could indicate the presence of life. The results beg a larger question, though: Can the JWST really ever detect life?

NASA's Lucy spacecraft, currently journeying toward Jupiter's orbit on its asteroid-hopping mission, captured an impressive close-up of its second target: the main belt asteroid 52246 Donaldjohanson.

Learn about the solar system from a pair of real space museum curators in sci-fi game Elite Dangerous, as Abbie MacKinnon and Laura Joy Pieters of the London Science Museum give a guided tour of our home system.

Skywatchers, get ready! The Lyrid meteor shower is set to peak, offering a spectacular sight for anyone willing to stay up late or rise early.

'We've all done bad things': Yelena, aka White Widow, bares her soul in final trailer for Marvel's 'Thunderbolts' ahead of the May 2 release.

The U.S. Space Force now has an official "Space Warfighting" doctrine outlining how the service can train and prepare units for a war fought in space.

Astronomers discovered a planet that orbits its star so closely that its surface is being scorched into magma and vaporizing into space.