Space

Space and science coverage including asteroids, galaxies, planets, NASA and SpaceX launches.

India shot a missile at a satellite and now the debris might hit the International Space Station

April 2nd, 2019

You can’t exactly see it from down here on Earth, but there’s a whole lot of junk floating around in the space around our planet. The vast majority of it is man-made, including pieces of satellites, entire defunct spacecraft, and bits and pieces of past space missions. Now, thanks to a hilariously bad decision by …

Science

NASA discovers Saturn’s moons are caked in ring dust

April 2nd, 2019

Mike Wehner

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has long since bitten the proverbial dust, but data it sent back years ago is now revealing how actual dust affects some of the planet’s many moons. As NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory explains in a new blog post, Saturn’s iconic rings tend to litter some of its moons with a variety of …

Science

Student astronomer spots two new planets with the help of AI

April 2nd, 2019

Mike Wehner

Discovering planets that nobody has ever seen before is even harder than it sounds. Space telescopes from NASA and other scientific bodies have gathered an incredible amount of data that will take astronomers years and years to sift through, and many times there’s just nothing there to be found. But humans don’t have to do …

Science

Watch NASA astronauts live on a spacewalk outside the ISS

March 29th, 2019

Mike Wehner

NASA was forced to cancel a planned all-female spacewalk this week, replacing astronaut Anne McClain with fellow ISS resident Nick Hague due to a lack of available space suits in the correct sizes. The space program has gotten a lot of (largely undeserved) criticism for the situation, but the show must go on, and the …

Science

NASA’s Hubble spotted an asteroid spinning so fast it’s self-destructing

March 28th, 2019

Mike Wehner

When you imagine an asteroid cruising through the solar system you probably think of it as a static object, not doing much beyond speeding along in a straight line and eventually running into something. The reality can be much different and, as a new image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows, asteroids sometimes have self-destructive …

Science

NASA’s TESS exoplanet hunter just spotted a brand new ‘hot Saturn’

March 28th, 2019

Mike Wehner

NASA TESS spacecraft has been in space for almost a year now, and it powerful imaging tools are definitely being put to work. As we saw with last year’s first batch of snapshots from NASA, TESS is capable of surveying huge portions of the sky in great detail, and that work just payed off in …

Science

NASA spots ‘Space Butterfly’ giving birth to new stars

March 27th, 2019

Mike Wehner

Our Sun is one of the big reasons we’re all here today. It provides much of the energy needed for life to exist, and without it I wouldn’t be writing this and you wouldn’t be here to read it. We think of stars as ancient things that have been there forever but new ones are …

Science

Trump desperately wants the US in another space race that simply doesn’t exist

March 27th, 2019

Mike Wehner

Donald Trump threw NASA for a loop shortly after taking office when he directed them to find a way to get humans back on the Moon. Putting astronauts on the Moon is obviously easier said than done, but NASA has been piecing together how such a mission might work ever since. Now, at a meeting …

Science

NASA forced to cancel first all-female spacewalk in history over wardrobe malfunction

March 26th, 2019

Mike Wehner

For NASA, March 29th was going to be a history-making day at the International Space Station, with the first all-female spacewalk in human history. Astronauts Anne McClain and Christina Koch were scheduled to perform a variety of tasks on the exterior of the space station and it would have been the first time that two …

Science

NASA and ESA are paying volunteers to lie in bed for 60 days to test artificial gravity

March 25th, 2019

Mike Wehner

Regardless of what your own personal idea of a dream job might be, you have to admit that being paid to lounge around in bed sounds pretty awesome. That’s exactly what NASA and ESA want a crew of volunteers to do in order to test the potential benefits of artificial gravity for long-haul space missions. …