When humans finally return to the moon as part of NASA’s Artemis program, they’ll arrive with a bevy of high-tech equipment to capture new, awe-inspiring glimpses of Earth’s satellite. But cameras have come a long way since the Apollo missions. In 2023, some incredibly advanced options are already almost moon-ready right off the shelf. According […]
To combat orbital pollution, engineers have devised a lightweight tether that uses photons to slow down satellites.
Having already done a decent job of it here on Earth, humans are well on their way to polluting the skies just beyond our atmosphere. After nearly 70 years of modern rocketry and satellite projects, there are literally millions of centimeter-and-larger discarded objects orbiting the planet—alongside an estimated 130 million tinier bits of space trash. […]
After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Roscosmos was summarily cut out of the ExoMars project, taking with it the rocket that was to deliver the Rosalind Franklin rover to space.
When you see a distant star in the night sky, it might twinkle and look like it has five points. This is largely a trick of the eye. Zoomed in, most stars are just round balls of gasses and dust. As they age, heat up, consume other matter, and sometimes explode, they take on more […]
The European Space Agency will send an explorer called JUICE in 2023 to Jupiter and three of its oceanic moons.
The Hubble Space Telescope recently captured space images of two galaxies in a gravitational battle in the Pegasus constellation.
The European Space Agency is working on a prototype of a spherical rover that could explore the depths of lunar caverns. It would be the first mission to delve beneath the surface of another world. The small craft, called DAEDALUS—for Descent And Exploration in Deep Autonomy of Lunar Underground Structures—would be lowered into caverns from […]
To ring in the new year, NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) dropped six captivating images of galaxies smashing into one another.
Some 322 light-years away in the constellation Libra lies one of the most extreme and hottest worlds discovered by astronomers so far. Launched into Earth orbit last December, the European Space Agency’s shiny new exoplanet-hunting satellite CHaracterising ExOPlanet Satellite (or CHEOPS) spotted exoplanet WASP-189b, a gas giant circling close to one of the hottest known stars with a planetary system.
