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NASA wants to build a base on the Moon by the 2030s, How and why it plans to build up to a long‑term lunar presence

The next U.S. trip to the moon isn’t about planting a flag. It’s about learning how to live and work there. NASA has just reset its Artemis program, marking a clear strategic shift: Space exploration is moving away from a race to achieve milestones and toward a system built on repeated operations, a sustained presence […]

How plants could betray themselves across the galaxy

Here’s a thought experiment. Imagine looking at Earth from a distant star system, armed with a powerful telescope capable of capturing its reflected light. Could you tell the planet was alive? The answer, remarkably, might be yes and the clue would come from the color of the plants.

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Hera aces a massive engine burn on its way to Didymos

In September 2022, humanity crashed a spacecraft into an asteroid—on purpose. The objective of NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) was to see if we could intentionally modify the orbit of Dimorphos, the small moonlet orbiting the larger asteroid Didymos. According to all accounts, the mission worked spectacularly, but it was a one-way trip, so […]

Measuring titanium in Apollo rock to uncover moon’s early chemistry

Earth and the moon may look very different today, but they formed under similar conditions in space. In fact, a dominant hypothesis says that the early Earth was hit by a Mars-sized object, and it was this giant impact that spun off material to form the moon. But unlike Earth, the moon lacks plate tectonics […]

Scientists harness plasma clumps trapped in stellar magnetospheres to assess habitability around M dwarf stars

How does a star affect the makeup of its planets? And what does this mean for the habitability of distant worlds? Carnegie’s Luke Bouma is exploring a new way to probe this critical question—using naturally occurring space weather stations that orbit at least 10% of M dwarf stars during their early lives. He presented his […]

Earth formed from material exclusively from the inner solar system, planetary scientists show

Planetary scientists have long debated where the material that formed Earth comes from. Despite its location in the inner solar system, they consider it likely that 6–40% of this material must have come from the outer solar system, i.e., beyond Jupiter. For a long time, material from the outer solar system was considered necessary to […]

New Henrietta spectrograph to probe alien atmospheres

Finding life beyond our solar system goes beyond measuring an exoplanet’s size, as rocky, Earth-sized worlds might not have the conditions for life as we know it. While exoplanets can be directly imaged by blocking their star’s glare, these images are fuzzy and lack resolution to provide enough details about the habitability. Therefore, astronomers are […]

A rare ‘triple-double’ radio galaxy discovered using MeerKAT

Astronomers have discovered an exceptionally rare radio galaxy that has three distinct pairs of radio lobes. This system falls into a subpopulation of radio galaxies known as “triple-double” radio galaxies (TDRGs). Located nearly 7.5 billion light-years away, this unique system, cataloged as J022248−060934, is only the seventh known example of its kind. A paper outlining […]

Apollo’s impatient old-timers are rooting for NASA’s return to the moon with Artemis II launch

The people who toiled night and day to put astronauts on the moon during Apollo are thrilled that NASA is finally going back. They just wish these Artemis moonshots had happened sooner while more of Apollo’s workforce was still alive.

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Ripples in spacetime and the universe’s most controversial number

Douglas Adams told us the answer to life, the universe and everything is 42. If only cosmology were so straightforward. Astronomers have been arguing for years about a number every bit as fundamental, and they still can’t agree on it.

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Apollo vs. Artemis: What to know about NASA’s return to the moon

NASA’s Apollo moonshots are a tough act to follow, even after all this time.

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ZTF discovers a new mass-transferring brown dwarf binary system

Astronomers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and elsewhere report the discovery of a binary system consisting of two brown dwarfs undergoing stable mass transfer. The detection of the system, designated ZTF J1239+8347, was made with the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) and is detailed in a paper published March 18 in The Astrophysical Journal […]

TESS discovers an Earth-sized planet orbiting nearby M-dwarf star

Using NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), an international team of astronomers has discovered an extrasolar planet orbiting TOI-4616—a nearby M-dwarf star. The newfound alien world, which received designation TOI-4616 b, is slightly larger than Earth. The finding was reported in a research paper published March 11 on the arXiv pre-print server.

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The time capsule in the salt flat

There is a place in northern Chile, 3,500 meters above sea level in the Andean Altiplano, where almost nothing survives. The Salar de Pajonales is a salt flat of savage extremes temperatures swinging from −23°C to 26°C, solar radiation among the highest measured anywhere on Earth, annual rainfall that barely registers, and winds that rip […]

The moon that tipped a planet

Neptune is the solar system’s most distant planet, a cold, blue ice giant sitting nearly 30 times further from the sun than Earth. At that remote distance, temperatures plunge to nearly minus 200 degrees Celsius and a single year lasts 165 Earth years. Yet despite its isolation, Neptune is a world whipped by the fastest […]