Orientation is more important than most people thing when it comes to sensing. A common example would be when the lasers of a garage door are mis-aligned, forcing the door to remain open until they are brought back in line. But when it comes to scientific sensors, orientation is even more important. So it was with great fanfare that NASA announced a new way to orient sensors on one of the most venerable of its spacecraft - the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) - and the resultant scientific discoveries it enabled.
Space News & Blog Articles
Exoplanet Hunters May Be Misrepresenting The Likelihood Of Their Findings
There’s nothing to get a scientist’s heart pumping like a good, old-fashioned statistical debate. When it comes to topics like finding Earth analogues or hints of a biosignature in an atmosphere, those statistical debates could have real world consequences, both for the assignment of additional observational resources, but also for humanity’s general understanding of itself in the Universe. A new paper from two prominent exoplanet hunters, David Kipping from Columbia and Björn Benneke from UCLA, argues that their colleagues in the field of exoplanet detection have been doing statistics all wrong for decades, and make a argument for how better to present their results to the public.
HAKUTO-R Mission 2's Crash was Caused by its Laser Range Finder
Japan’s ispace sheds light on what may have caused the Resilience lunar lander failure.
The Presence of Certain Minerals May Explain Why the Lunar Farside and Nearside are so Different
Up until 1959, humans had never laid eyes on the lunar farside. In that year, the USSR's Luna 3 spacecraft flew around the Moon and sent pictures of the farside back to Earth. Though the images were grainy and black and white, they were still revealing. They showed us that the farside was different. It has more craters and fewer of the dark volcanic plains, called 'maria', that characterize the near side.
See the crescent moon dance with Mars and the bright star Regulus this weekend
For some lucky viewers, the moon will pass directly in front of Mars.
Nozzle blows off rocket booster during test for NASA's Artemis program (video)
A solid rocket engine for NASA's Space Launch System rocket experienced an anomaly during a static fire test at the booster's Northrop Grumman facilities June 26.
Hello, neighbor! See the Andromeda galaxy like never before in stunning new image from NASA's Chandra telescope (video)
Andromeda never looked as good as it does in a new image from the Chandra X-ray observatory and a range of powerful telescopes. A fitting tribute to dark matter pioneer Vera Rubin.
A new adventure on the International Space Station
Video: 00:04:13
Daniel Neuenschwander, ESA head of Space and Robotic Exploration, explains that Ignis mission will include an ambitious technological and scientific programme with several experiments led by ESA and proposed by the Polish space industry.
SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket creates nebula-like ring in night sky | Space photo of the day for June 27, 2025
SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket with the Dragon spacecraft carrying Axiom-4 astronauts heads to the International Space Station.
Bootid meteor shower 2025 peaks tonight: Here's what you need to know
The meteor shower radiant can be found in the constellation Bootes.
Rare daytime fireball bright enough to be seen from orbit may have punched a hole in a house in Georgia
The fireball was bright enough to be spotted by a lightning-tracking satellite from orbit.
Mexico threatens lawsuit against SpaceX over Starship explosion 'contamination'
The Mexican president said there is a "general review underway of the international laws that are being violated."
Citizen Scientists Help Discover 8,000 New Eclipsing Binaries
Despite the proliferation of AI based research lately, sometimes researchers need a human eye to make true discoveries. That collaboration was in evidence in a recent paper by Dr. Veselin Kostov, a research scientist at the SETI Institute and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, who led a team of almost 1,800 to review a dataset from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) that led to the discovery of almost 8,000 new eclipsing binary systems.
How a fake astronaut fooled the world, broke women’s hearts, and landed in jail
For years, Robert Hunt convinced everyone he could that he was a NASA astronaut. The truth was anything but.
If We Can't Detect the First Stars, Maybe We Can See Their First Galaxies
Population III (PopIII) stars represent astronomy's ultimate prize are the first generation of stars born from the pristine hydrogen and helium created in the Big Bang. These theoretical giants, potentially hundreds of times more massive than our Sun, should have been fundamentally different from any stars we see today. They contained virtually no “metals,” astronomy’s term for elements heavier than helium, because none existed yet in the universe.
Cryovolcanism and Resurfacing on Pluto’s Largest Moon, Charon
What processes during the formation of Pluto’s largest moon, Charon, potentially led to it having cryovolcanism, and even an internal ocean? This is what a recent study presented at the 56th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference hopes to address as a team of researchers investigated the formation and evolution of Charon to ascertain whether it once possessed an internal ocean during its history and if this could have led to cryovolcanism based on images obtained by NASA’s New Horizons probe.
New Propulsion Systems Could Enable a Mission to Sedna
In the outer reaches of our Solar System, far beyond the orbit of Pluto, lies one of the most mysterious objects ever discovered, Sedna. This reddish dwarf planet follows such an extreme orbit that it takes over 11,000 years to complete a single journey around the Sun. Now, scientists are proposing a new mission to reach this distant world using a revolutionary propulsion technology.
Planets Form Earlier Than Thought Around Baby Stars
Star formation is a hidden event, at least in its very early stages. Stellar crèches are veiled by clouds of gas and dust. Those same clouds also shield planet formation, particularly in the very beginning. So, astronomers don't always get to see the action until the dust has cleared. Although the newly forming planets are too small to see, their gravity stirs up spiral and ring patterns in the so-called protoplanetary disks around the newborn stars. So, when do those patterns begin to appear in the birth process?
Flyby Mission Strategies for Detecting Oceans on Uranus’ Moons
What methods can be used to identify subsurface oceans on the five largest moons of Uranus: Ariel, Umbriel, Titania and Oberon, and Miranda? This is what a recent study presented at the 56th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference hopes to address as a team of scientists from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) investigated potentially using radio science on the Uranus Orbiter and Probe (UOP) concept mission, which was designated as a high priority Flagship-class mission by the 2023–2032 Planetary Science Decadal Survey.
Webb Could Detect if Supermassive Black Holes Formed Directly
One of the most perplexing discoveries in modern astronomy has been finding supermassive black holes, some weighing billions of times more than our Sun, in galaxies that formed less than 750 million years after the Big Bang. They appear to have grown impossibly fast, challenging our understanding of how black holes form and evolve.