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Space Missions
From the coldest planets to spacecraft that have exited the Solar System, these little-known facts stump even many professional astronomers.
In December 1968, human beings made their first-ever journey to the Moon aboard Apollo 8. Their most important discovery? Planet Earth.
The threats Mars astronauts face — and how NASA is working to solve them.
NASA's only flagship X-ray telescope ever, Chandra, still works and has no planned successor. So why does the President want to kill it?
NASA gave three robots plans for a moon shelter, and the robots figured out how to build it.
The case for why NASA should pivot to searching for current — not ancient — signs of life.
NASA's Juno mission, in orbit around Jupiter, occasionally flies past its innermost large moon: Io. The volcanic activity is unbelievable.
If there’s life lurking on the moons of Saturn and Jupiter, could our instruments even detect it?
The record-breaking transmission could revolutionize deep space communication.
The first tests of optical communications far from Earth will take place aboard the asteroid-bound Psyche spacecraft
As Uranus approaches its solstice, its polar caps, rings, and moons come into their best focus ever under JWST's watchful eye. See it now!
Out of the four rocky planets in our Solar System, only Earth presently has plate tectonics. But billions of years ago, Venus had them, too.
Considering the astronomical occupational risks, life insurance was prohibitively expensive for the first NASA astronauts.
The asteroid is expected to come within 140,000 miles of Earth — well inside the moon’s orbit.
Whether you call it 10 quintillion, 10 million trillion, or 10 billion billion, it's a 1 followed by 19 zeroes.
Over 50 years since humans last walked on the Moon, astronaut footprints and rover tracks are still visible. But they won't last forever.
The outer planets' clouds hide the weirdness within.
Memorial day is a time to remember veterans killed in the line of service. These spaceflight heroes deserve to be remembered, too.
A next-generation instrument on a delayed rover may be the key to answering the question of life on Mars.
Mars, the red planet, was a world we knew almost nothing about until our first spacecraft visited it. In just ~50 years, how far we've come!
It's not about fairness. It's about using every possible advantage.
Like Mars today, Venus used to be a sci-fi superstar. Recent discoveries could re-ignite our interest in Earth’s “evil twin.”
Voyager 2 flew past Uranus in 1986, finding a bland, featureless world. Now, in 2023, JWST's sights are similar. There's a reason for that.
JWST's revolutionary views arrive in high-resolution at infrared wavelengths. Without NASA's Spitzer first, it wouldn't have been possible.
Some of them have survived the wilds of space for billions of years.
We may have discovered alien life already but rejected the evidence too quickly because it seemed false at first glance.
A conversation with an advanced alien species is likely to be simple and to take 1,000 years. It might also be dangerous.
It's a radical but plausible idea.
2023 will see the launch of new rockets, the return of OSIRIS-REx, and a mission to Jupiter that could help us find extraterrestrial life.
In 2020, scientists took more than a kilo of moon rock and soil back to Earth for testing.