News From Space
An international team of researchers has used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to calculate the amount of heat energy coming from the rocky exoplanet TRAPPIST-1 c. The result suggests that the planet’s atmosphere, if it exists at all, is extremely thin. With a dayside temperature of roughly 380 Kelvins (about 225 degrees Fahrenheit), TRAPPIST-1 […]
Astronomers used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to image the warm dust around a nearby young star, Fomalhaut, to study the first asteroid belt ever seen outside of our solar system in infrared light. But to their surprise, the dusty structures are much more complex than the asteroid and Kuiper dust belts of our […]
With just a few weeks to go before its October 5 launch, NASA’s Psyche spacecraft is undergoing final preparations at Cape Canaveral, Florida. Teams of engineers and technicians are working almost around the clock to ensure the orbiter is ready to journey 4 billion kilometers (2.5 billion miles) to a metal-rich asteroid that may tell […]
NASA’s Juno spacecraft flew past Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io on May 16 and then the gas giant itself. The flyby of the jovian moon was the closest to date, at an altitude of about 35,500 kilometers (22,060 miles). Now in the third year of its extended mission to investigate the interior of Jupiter, the solar-powered […]
For the first time, NASA scientists have strong evidence of a polar cyclone on Uranus. By examining radio waves emitted from the ice giant, they detected the phenomenon at the planet’s north pole. The findings confirm a broad truth about all planets with substantial atmospheres in our solar system: Whether the planets are composed mainly […]
NASA switched off one of its oldest instruments studying Mars on April 3, a step that’s been planned since last year. Riding on board NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars, or CRISM, revealed minerals such as clays, hematite (otherwise known as iron oxide), and sulfates across the Red Planet’s […]
While NASA retired its InSight Mars lander in December, the trove of data from its seismometer will be pored over for decades to come. By looking at seismic waves the instrument detected from a pair of temblors in 2021, scientists have been able to deduce that Mars’ liquid iron core is smaller and denser than […]
NASA’s Lunar Flashlight launched on December 11, 2022, to demonstrate several new technologies, with an ultimate goal to seek out surface ice in the permanently shadowed craters of the Moon’s south pole. Since then, the briefcase-size satellite’s miniaturized propulsion system — the first of its kind ever flown — proved unable to generate enough thrust […]
A study published in May in the journal Nature documents the first observation of an aging star swallowing a planet. After running out of fuel in its core, the star began to grow, shrinking the gap with its neighboring planet, eventually consuming it entirely. In about 5 billion years, our Sun will go through a similar aging process, […]
New images taken by NASA’s Perseverance rover may show signs of what was once a rollicking river on Mars, one that was deeper and faster moving than scientists have ever seen evidence for in the past. The river was part of a network of waterways that flowed into Jezero Crater, the area the rover has […]