In the continuing saga of billionaires and big rockets comes Amazon founder Jeff Bezos with his latest space vehicle, New Glenn. The rocket, which stands taller than the Statue of Liberty, is named after NASA astronaut John Glenn, the first person to orbit Earth in 1962. Though much shorter than SpaceX‘s towering Starship, it is […]
NASA’s spacecraft has reported back after making a plunge into the sun. The Parker Solar Probe has transmitted a beacon tone, indicating it’s operational and in good health, NASA confirmed just after midnight on Friday, Dec. 27. Tweet may have been deleted The probe broke several records on Christmas Eve as it arrived just 3.8 […]
Early on Christmas Eve in 2024, a NASA craft swooped at blazing speed through the sun’s atmosphere. The Parker Solar Probe, equipped with a robust heat shield, made the closest-ever approach to our dynamic star, coming some 3.8 million miles (6.1 million kilometers) from the stellar surface. That’s seven times closer than any other probe. […]
NASA’s Juno spacecraft zipped just 930 miles (1,500 kilometers) above the volcanic world Io in 2024. The extraterrestrial vistas, including a view of the most powerful volcano known to humanity, didn’t disappoint. “It’s absolutely stunning, stunning imagery,” Ashley Davies, a planetary scientist at the space agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told Mashable. Other space missions have captured […]
No astronaut has ever stepped foot on Mars, but that doesn’t mean humans haven’t left their mark — literally. Since 1971 when the Soviet Union’s Mars 2 spacecraft crash-landed onto the Red Planet, people have littered the Martian surface with man-made junk, quite a feat from an average of 140 million-miles away. Broken spacecraft debris, […]
NASA’s preparing to put astronauts on its new moon-bound spacecraft. Every system is being rigorously tested. The space agency released footage of engineers assessing the Orion craft’s essential launch abort system, wherein a cover must blast off the crew capsule before parachutes deploy. NASA also tested Orion’s response to lighting strikes and other extreme abort […]
Just on the outskirts of a supermassive black hole roughly 4 million times more massive than the sun, a pair of stars locked in a dance is thriving. Astronomers discovered the duo orbiting Sagittarius A*, the Milky Way galaxy’s central supermassive black hole, using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile. The binary […]
ICEYE closes million$$ extension to existing growth funding round (Image Credit: Sat News) ICEYE has closed a $65 million extension of the company’s earlier growth funding round of $93 million that was announced in April 2024. The funding round extension included participation from funds managed by Solidium Oy, BlackRock, Seraphim, Plio Limited, […]
Sure, the aging International Space Station has a well-known, ongoing leak. But it’s not nearly in danger of imminently crashing. NASA responded to a post on X, formerly Twitter, claiming that the “ISS is going to crash soon via de-orbit,” and included a screenshot from a 4chan post with a blurry graph showing altitude data. […]
What a NASA spacecraft saw at a robot’s grave from orbit (Image Credit: Mashable) For the past two years, a NASA spacecraft has sat lifeless on the surface of Mars, its solar panels caked with dirt. From a vantage point in space, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter recently caught a glimpse of the […]
