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Private US company blasts off for second moon landing attempt

A US company is aiming for its second lunar touchdown after a lander carrying a suite of unique experiments successfully launched aboard a SpaceX rocket on Wednesday.

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As expected, the threat from Asteroid 2024 YR4 has essentially dropped to zero

New information is pushing Asteroid 2024 YR4 off of our front pages. Initial estimates gave it a 2.8% chance of striking Earth in 2032. Now, the European Space Agency says the chance of it striking our planet is down to a paltry 0.001%.

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Image: The Milky Way on the horizon

NASA astronaut Don Pettit used a camera with low light and long duration settings to capture this Jan. 29, 2025, image of the Milky Way appearing beyond Earth’s horizon.

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View the rare ‘planet parade’ this week and learn why it’s happening

The night sky offers us a variety of spectacles throughout the year, but for the remainder of the month, we have front-row seats to see—not one or two—but seven planets at once.

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Six things to know about NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer

Launching no earlier than Wednesday, Feb. 26, NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer will help resolve an enduring mystery: Where is the moon’s water? After sharing a ride on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with Intuitive Machines’ IM-2 launch—part of NASA’s CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) initiative—the small satellite will take several months to arrive in lunar orbit. […]

Study reveals how rogue planetary-mass objects form in young star clusters

A study published in Science Advances sheds new light on the mysterious origins of free-floating planetary-mass objects (PMOs)—celestial bodies with masses between stars and planets.

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Adsorptive regolith on Mars soaks up water, updated model shows

Mars, the next frontier in space exploration, still poses many questions for scientists. The planet was once more hospitable, characterized by a warm and wet climate with liquid oceans. But today Mars is cold and dry, with most water now located below the surface. Understanding how much water is stored offers critical information for energy […]

Private US company set for second moon landing attempt

Intuitive Machines made history last year as the first private company to put a robot on the moon, although the triumph was marred by the lander tipping onto its side.

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Mars’s core evolution: Lab experiments hint at solid inner core formation

Geochemical evidence from laboratory experiments for a potential solid inner core at the center of Mars is reported in Nature Communications.

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Study investigates outburst of cataclysmic variable system GK Persei

Chinese astronomers have analyzed the data from NASA’s Swift observatory, which extensively observed an outburst of the cataclysmic variable system known as GK Persei. Results of the study, published February 20 on the arXiv preprint server, shed more light on the nature of this system.

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One of the most massive black holes in the universe lurks at the center of the Cosmic Horseshoe

In 2007, astronomers discovered the Cosmic Horseshoe, a gravitationally lensed system of galaxies about 5.5 billion light-years away. The foreground galaxy’s mass magnifies and distorts the image of a distant background galaxy whose light has traveled for billions of years before reaching us. The foreground and background galaxies are in such perfect alignment that they […]

Every planet of our solar system is lining up in the February night sky

Seven planets grace the sky at the end of February in what’s known as a planetary parade, though some will be difficult to spot with the naked eye.

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NASA’s EZIE is launching to study magnetic fingerprints of Earth’s aurora

High above Earth’s poles, intense electrical currents called electrojets flow through the upper atmosphere when auroras glow in the sky. These auroral electrojets push about a million amps of electrical charge around the poles every second. They can create some of the largest magnetic disturbances on the ground, and rapid changes in the currents can […]

Lucy spacecraft takes its first images of asteroid Donaldjohanson

NASA’s Lucy spacecraft has its next flyby target, the small main belt asteroid Donaldjohanson, in its sights. By blinking between images captured by Lucy on Feb. 20 and 22, this animation shows the perceived motion of Donaldjohanson relative to the background stars as the spacecraft rapidly approaches the asteroid.

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Scientists have discovered a 3-billion-year-old beach buried on Mars

In the 1970s, images from the NASA Mariner 9 orbiter revealed water-sculpted surfaces on Mars. This settled the once-controversial question of whether water ever rippled over the red planet.

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