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A new comet was just discovered. Will it be visible in broad daylight?

A newly discovered comet has astronomers excited, with the potential to be a spectacular sight in early April. C/2026 A1 (MAPS) was spotted by a team of four amateur astronomers with a remotely operated telescope in the Atacama desert on January 13.

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JWST discovers a new extremely metal-poor dwarf galaxy

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have discovered a new dwarf galaxy, which received designation CAPERS-39810. Further investigation of CAPERS-39810 revealed that it is an extremely metal-poor galaxy. The discovery was detailed in a paper published January 24 on the arXiv pre-print server.

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NASA hit by fuel leaks during a practice countdown of the moon rocket that will fly with astronauts

NASA ran into exasperating fuel leaks during a make-or-break test of its new moon rocket Monday, calling into question how soon astronauts could take off for a trip around the moon.

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Two huge hot blobs of rock influence Earth’s magnetic field, study reveals

Exploring Earth’s deep interior is a far bigger challenge than exploring the solar system. While we have traveled 25 billion km into space, the deepest we have ever gone below our feet is just over 12 km. Consequently, little is known about the conditions at the base of the mantle and the top of the […]

NASA fuels its moon rocket in a crucial test to decide when Artemis astronauts will launch

NASA fueled its new moon rocket in one final make-or-break test Monday, with hopes of sending astronauts on a lunar fly-around as soon as this coming weekend.

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NASA conducts vital tests ahead of slated Moon mission

NASA on Monday was conducting critical final tests ahead of setting a launch date for its first crewed flyby mission to the moon in more than half a century.

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Europe observatory hails plan to abandon light-polluting Chile project

Europe’s ESO star-gazing organization on Monday welcomed plans to call off building a massive green energy project in the Chilean desert which threatened to spoil its telescopes’ view of the darkest skies on Earth.

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Hubble sees galaxy with dark rings in new light

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features an uncommon galaxy with a striking appearance. NGC 7722 is a lenticular galaxy located about 187 million light-years away in the constellation Pegasus.

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Perseverance rover completes first AI-planned drive on Mars

NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover has completed the first drives on another world that were planned by artificial intelligence. Executed on Dec. 8 and 10, and led by the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, the demonstration used generative AI to create waypoints for Perseverance, a complex decision-making task typically performed manually by the mission’s […]

As Rubin’s survey gets underway, simulations suggest it could find about six lunar-origin asteroids per year

Most near-Earth asteroids are thought to drift in from the main asteroid belt. But a small subset may have a much closer origin: the moon. One intriguing example is 469219 Kamoʻoalewa (2016 HO3), an Earth quasi-satellite whose reported spectrum resembles lunar material and which is a target of China’s Tianwen-2 sample-return mission.

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FAA dismisses airline, sonic boom concerns in signing off on SpaceX Starship plans from KSC

SpaceX’s path to launching its massive Starship rocket from Florida’s Space Coast passed another hurdle Friday after the Federal Aviation Administration released results of its nearly two-year long environmental review for launch plans from Kennedy Space Center.

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Cracks on Europa sport traces of ammonia

The search for life-supporting worlds in the solar system includes the Jovian moon Europa. Yes, it’s an iceberg of a world, but underneath its frozen exterior lies a deep, salty ocean and a nickel-iron core. It’s heated by tidal flexing, and that puts pressure on the interior ocean, sending water and salts to the surface. […]

SpaceX seeks FCC nod to build data center constellation in space

SpaceX is requesting permission to launch as many as 1 million satellites into the Earth’s orbit in order to pull off Elon Musk’s latest grand vision of putting data centers in space to do complex computing for artificial intelligence. In a filing with the Federal Communications Commission made on Jan. 30, SpaceX said it’s creating […]

NASA begins a practice countdown for its first moonshot with astronauts in more than 50 years

NASA began a two-day practice countdown Saturday leading up to the fueling of its new moon rocket, a crucial test that will determine when four astronauts blast off on a lunar flyby.

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Powerful Milky Way stellar flares near black hole could refine galaxy center models

Deep in the frozen heart of Antarctica, the South Pole Telescope has been watching one of the most extreme neighborhoods in our galaxy, and it’s just caught something extraordinary happening there. Astronomers have detected powerful stellar flares erupting from stars near the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. These aren’t your […]