NASA tests dual mode propulsion CubeSat ahead of launch

Spacecraft propulsion traditionally relies on volatile fuels and separate, bulky systems for different types of maneuvering in space. NASA is working to change that. Engineers at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, recently completed a series of environmental and physical tests on a new small satellite designed to make spaceflight safer and more […]

SpaceX’s supersized Starship launches toward orbit for the first time

SpaceX launched its enormous Starship toward orbit for the first time Monday, aiming for six full laps around Earth to prove its readiness for NASA’s Artemis moon program.

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A tiny stellar system may be a ‘satellite of a satellite’

Astronomers using data from the Euclid space telescope have discovered an exceptionally faint stellar system near the Fornax dwarf galaxy. Called Fornax-7, it appears to contain only about 170 times the mass of the sun in stars. The discovery paper was posted to the arXiv preprint server on Sept. 13.

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SpaceX aims to put Starship in orbit for the first time

Three years after its first test flight, SpaceX’s Starship rocket will attempt Monday to enter Earth orbit, a key step in developing the massive launch vehicle for future missions to the moon and Mars.

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Astronomers discover a radio galaxy with evidence of four separate jet outbursts

Astronomers have identified what may be the first example of a new class of radio galaxy, one whose central black hole appears to have launched powerful jets on four separate occasions. High-resolution observations with the upgraded Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT), combined with data from MeerKAT and the Very Large Array, reveal four pairs of […]

Black hole jets reach far beyond galaxies’ visible edges, potentially deciding their fate

Galaxies are enormous and hold hundreds of billions of stars. These stars form from cold, dense gas. Every large galaxy, including the Milky Way, is wrapped in a huge envelope of gas called the circumgalactic medium, or CGM. This reservoir of raw material stretches 10–20 times the size of the visible portion of the galaxy. […]

Engineers teach spacecraft to ‘dream’ their way to the space station

Docking with the ISS may seem simple. However, actually doing so shows how difficult orbital mechanics can be. It’s like traveling down a highway at 28,000 km/hr (17,000 mph) and parallel parking in an open garage on a multibillion-dollar laboratory traveling at the same speed. If you try to accelerate forward, you actually drift up, […]

A real-time look inside spacecraft heat shields during extreme heat conditions

When a spacecraft reenters Earth’s atmosphere at hypersonic velocities, its protective heat shield faces extreme conditions, including temperatures beyond 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,650 degrees Celsius). To survive, the shield relies on specialized materials that absorb heat as they degrade in a controlled process called ablation, sacrificing the shield’s outer layers to protect the vehicle and […]

An overlooked era of cosmology is stealing the show in the quest to understand the cosmos

Could you imagine if pagers made a comeback? Sure, your smartphone would still be your notepad-flashlight-camera-personal assistant-MP3 player-wallet-social media browser. But imagine if pagers made it so easy to do that one important thing—pinging your friends and associates—that we all brought them back into our lives, or adopted them for the first time.

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Great news from Saturn’s moon Enceladus in the search for life in space

What are the chances of finding extraterrestrial life in our solar system? Frank Postberg, a professor of planetary science at Freie Universität Berlin, has published a study in Science Advances with an international team of researchers. They present new evidence that it is easier to determine the constituents of the ocean hidden beneath Enceladus’s icy […]

Testing an antenna layout for the SKA-Low telescope

SKA-Low is a radio telescope under construction in Western Australia. It will operate across a wide frequency range, from 50 to 350 MHz, and will be the most sensitive telescope of its kind ever built. The completed instrument will link 512 stations spread across an area roughly 75 km (47 miles) wide. Each station’s antennas […]

Private spacecraft falls back to Earth after failing to rescue aging NASA telescope

The robotic spacecraft that failed to rescue an aging NASA telescope plunged back to Earth on Friday less than three months after launching on the bold mission.

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Webb detects ammonia and unexpected chill on a distant giant planet

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), a team of astronomers led by the University of Maryland identified water, methane and ammonia in the atmosphere of HATS-6 b, a giant planet 500 light-years from Earth. The observations also revealed that HATS-6 b may be significantly cooler than standard calculations predict—suggesting that the planet’s relationship with […]

US-India satellite captures time-lapse video of volcanic eruption

Like tendrils on a vine, lava spreads out from the northern crater of Krasheninnikov, a volcano pair on the Pacific coast of Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula. On July 30, 2025, an 8.8-magnitude earthquake struck in the nearby ocean, apparently jolting one of the two volcanoes awake. A few days later, for the first time in nearly […]

Coolest lava world yet with signs of an atmosphere offers clues to early Earth

In the search for extraterrestrial life, it makes sense to first look for rocky planets with an atmosphere, like Earth. Without an atmosphere, a planet can’t have surface water. But of the more than 6,300 exoplanets cataloged thus far, the vast majority are not rocky, and only a handful of the rocky worlds appear to […]