Space News & Blog Articles

By 2028, NASA intends to land the "first woman and first person of color" on the Moon as part of the Artemis III mission. This will be the first time humans have been to the lunar surface since the Apollo astronauts last walked there in 1972. Along with international and commercial partners, NASA hopes that Artemis will enable a "sustained program of lunar exploration and development," which could include long-term facilities and habitats on the Moon. Given the expense of launching heavy payloads, sending all the equipment and materials needed to the Moon is impractical.

How do you search for a substance that doesn't give off any kind of light, but has a gravitational influence that shapes galaxies? That's the challenge researchers face as they try to find and explain the mysterious substance called dark matter. They're wrestling with an invisible "something" that appears to make up much of all matter in the Universe.

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.

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.

Japan’s ispace sheds light on what may have caused the Resilience lunar lander failure.

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.

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.

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.