When NASA peers into the sky with any of its various telescopes, there’s always the chance that scientists will spot something they’ve never seen before. Sometimes they see newborn stars, and other times they see huge shadows, but this newly-captured image from Hubble shows something you’d probably never expect to see in the depths of …
When the European Space Agency launched the SMART-1 probe back in the early 2000s it was designed to have a relatively short lifespan. The spacecraft was only meant to orbit the Moon for a few years before making a “controlled” impact with the lunar surface. Everything went according to plan… except for the fact that …
Science fiction movies have taught us that mixing AI with space travel rarely works out well. From HAL 9000 to Mother, something always seems to go wrong when you put an AI in space, but that isn’t stopping the European Space Agency and NASA from testing out their very own floating AI assistant in the …
The European Space Agency’s fancy new Mars orbiter only arrived at the Red Planet a few weeks ago, but it’s already delivering some really fantastic eye candy of the Martian surface. The Trace Gas Orbiter (or TGO for short) is currently orbiting the planet at an altitude of just 250 miles, which means it has …
NASA is going to have to shell out more cash for less cargo room in future resupply missions to the International Space Station. The information comes courtesy of a NASA audit (PDF) which revealed that SpaceX is going to be hiking up the prices for its services by a considerable margin. Future SpaceX resupply missions …
We’ve all seen it in the plot of cheesy sci-fi: Scientists find something in space that seems harmless so they decide to bring it back to a space station, or even Earth, to study. Things go wrong, and eventually everyone dies. Now, NASA and the European Space Agency have declared their intent to do something …
You might think of our Solar System as a pretty special place — and considering it’s produced the only known example of life, that’s probably a fair point of view — but the Milky Way, our home galaxy, is a pretty big place. It’s absolutely packed with stars, some 200 billion or thereabouts, and a …
In case you haven’t heard, space junk is an increasingly serious problem for our planet. The International Space Station has been forced to take steps to protect itself from floating debris, while China is dreaming of a day when it can zap orbiting litter out of the sky using lasers. Now, Airbus is testing its …
Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and even Uranus are getting lots of attention these days, with probes and rovers getting up close and personal with our planetary neighbors, but if we look in the other direction — towards the sun, rather than away from it — we find a planet that is just as interesting, and perhaps …
