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A SpaceX rocket will soon hit the moon, raising concerns about handing over space launches to private companies

SpaceX seems to have mistaken shooting for the moon with shooting at the moon. Forecast to occur on Aug. 5, a five-story-long piece of a rocket from one of the private space exploration company’s recent lunar missions is expected to hit the moon at around 5,400 miles per hour, around 24 times the speed of […]

Image: NASA’s Psyche mission captures Mars’ Huygens Crater

Captured by the multispectral imager instrument on NASA’s Psyche mission, this is an enhanced-color view of the large double-ring crater Huygens (upper right; about 290 miles, or 470 kilometers, in diameter) and the surrounding heavily cratered southern highlands near 15 degrees south latitude. The various colors in this dramatic scene are likely due to differences […]

Could future Mars settlers print their own tools?

If humans one day settle Mars, they will need tools and parts to build structures on the planet. Carrying heavy, bulky supplies 34 million miles from Earth would be impractical. A better plan, says Zane Mebruer, a recent graduate of the U of A, would be 3D printing items on the Red Planet. His new […]

Image: NASA’s Psyche mission spies Mars’ wind-blown craters during close approach

This view of the Martian surface, captured by NASA’s Psyche spacecraft on May 15, 2026, shows streaks that have formed due to wind blowing over impact craters in the Syrtis Major region. The image scale is nearly 1,200 feet (360 meters) per pixel. The wind streaks extend to about 30 miles (50 kilometers) long, and […]

SpaceX’s IPO moonshot draws some doubters on Wall Street

Elon Musk wants to take SpaceX public—and he’s asking investors to believe the rocket and AI company is worth almost $1.75 trillion.

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AtLAST, a telescope that could reveal the missing half of the universe

A new European-led telescope could map the dusty, hidden half of the universe, all without using fossil fuels. If you have ever seen the Milky Way in the night sky, you probably noticed that it looks cloudy. That is because towards the center of our galaxy, and of most galaxies, there are vast amounts of […]

New form of NAND flash data storage for deep space missions can survive 1 million rads

As space missions travel farther from Earth, spacecraft must increasingly be able to process and store their own data. Soon, artificial intelligence (AI) could be the primary tool for handling this growing volume of information.

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Innovative Mars rovers ‘swim’ through the sand

Some animals can move efficiently beneath granular surfaces. These include the sandfish (Scincus scincus), a lizard native to the Sahara. It can burrow into the sand and then literally “swim” through the desert sand to hunt or escape predators.

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German firms join forces on space surveillance system

German defense tech start-up Helsing and space technology group OHB on Tuesday unveiled a joint venture to develop an AI-powered surveillance and targeting system for use in outer space.

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MeerKAT discovers 15 new millisecond pulsars in a well known globular cluster

Using the MeerKAT radio telescope, an international team of astronomers has discovered 15 new millisecond pulsars in 47 Tucanae—one of the closest and best studied globular clusters. The finding is reported in the latest issue of Astronomy & Astrophysics.

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Indigenous Australians were the world’s first astronomers. But their knowledge is now at risk

I’m a proud Yorta Yorta and Barapa Barapa man, an Indigenous astronomer and a trainee ecologist. When I look at the night sky, I don’t just see stars. Instead, I see an ancient knowledge system that has guided people, culture and Country for tens of thousands of years.

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Asteroid 2022 OB5 spins too fast for current prospectors, highlighting the divide between ‘accessible’ and ‘exploitable’

Asteroid mining seems simple in theory. A spacecraft flies up to a giant rock in space, scoops out some material, and either processes it on site or returns it back to a huge central processing facility. But in practice, it is certainly not that simple, and a new paper from some Spanish researchers, published in […]

Consistency check casts doubt on evolving dark energy

Cosmologists have long struggled to determine whether the universe’s accelerating expansion is being driven by a simple cosmological constant, or whether dark energy’s influence is evolving over time. In a new analysis published in Physical Review D, Samsuzzaman Afroz and Suvodip Mukherjee at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, have identified a subtle impact […]

SMILE spacecraft launches to capture first X-ray views of Earth’s magnetic shield

A joint European-Chinese spacecraft blasted off into orbit Tuesday to investigate what happens when extreme winds and giant explosions of plasma shot out from the sun slam into Earth’s magnetic shield.

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Video: Preparing Smile for space

Before Smile can begin studying how Earth responds to the streams of particles and bursts of radiation from the sun, the spacecraft had to complete an extraordinary journey here on Earth.

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