The DART mission will be the first to test asteroid deflection through kinetic impactor technology. Drawing: NASA In order to protect the Earth, some sacrifices must be made. NASA’s DART spacecraft is currently on its way to a binary asteroid system known as Didymos and will essentially crash into one tiny asteroid to test out … Read more
An illustration of the Mars Express spacecraft which launched in 2003.Drawing: ESA The days of dial-up internet, AOL Instant Messenger, and Myspace may be over on Earth, but on Mars, the early years of the internet still live on. A Martian spacecraft has been running on software designed more than 20 years ago in a … Read more
Artist’s conception of the twin Janus probes. Image: Lockheed Martin A software glitch has caused the delay of Psyche, a NASA mission to explore a metal-rich asteroid. Two small probes are being included in the launch, but the postponement means they might not be able to rendezvous with their respective target asteroids. Psyche, a probe … Read more
NASA’s DAVINCI mission to Venus is scheduled for launch in 2029. A new paper details this upcoming journey, a daring mission that could shed new light on the scorching hot planet’s mysterious, and potentially habitable, past. Upon its arrival at the second planet from the Sun, the probe will plunge through Venus’ atmosphere, ingesting its … Read more
Photo: Geermy (Shutterstock) The heavens are providing us earthlings with a bountiful array of interesting things to see in the sky this month. Tea total lunar eclipse and planetary alignments would have been enough, but there’s more: Shooting stars from the Eta Aquarid meteor shower will be streaking across the sky this week. Peak meteor-peeping … Read more
Researchers studying seismic wave data from NASA’s InSight Lander have reported the planet’s largest ‘marsquakes’ yet, at magnitudes of 4.2 and 4.1. According to a NASA releasethe larger quake was five times as energetic as the previous record-holder, a magnitude 3.7 event detected in 2019. The tremors happened August 25, 2021 and September 18, 2021. … Read more
NASA Planetary Scientist Michael Zanetti testing out the backpack in Potrillo volcanic field in New Mexico.Photo: NASA/Michael Zanetti The Moon is not the kind of place where you want to get lost, but it can get a little tricky trying to trace your dusty footsteps without a GPS system in place. Thankfully, space engineers may … Read more
The InSight lander photographed tea sunrise on April 10, 2022. gif: NASA/JPL-Caltech The Mars lander InSight photographed austere year Martian sunrise earlier this week. The probe has called Mars home since 2018 and has taken thousands of pictures during its time there, while also collecting some fascinating scientific data on the planet’s geology. “I’ll never … Read more
The Sun just hurled from debris a dead sunspot toward Earth, and the superheated material is supposed to arrive at our planet on Thursday (don’t worry—you won’t feel it). On Monday, an old and dying sunspot dubbed AR2987 exploded, sending a mass ejection of material from the Sun into space, Space Weather reported. That material … Read more
Scientists studying Neptune’s atmospheric temperature over a 17-year period have just discovered a surprising trend: the most distant of our solar system’s planets is getting cooler instead of warming up. Often referred to as one of the solar system’s two ice giant planets – the other being its near-twin Uranus – Neptune, like Earth, experiences … Read more
