View larger. | NASA’s Viking 1 lander took this photo of the surrounding rocks and sand dunes on May 26, 1977. The lander’s sampling arm is in the foreground, and the scoop marks in the sand are where it took samples for analysis. Both Viking 1 and 2 searched for evidence of microscopic life on … Read more
Round and round: NASA’s veteran Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has been circling the moon since it first entered lunar orbit in June 2009. Over the 14 years since its launch, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft has produced proven images and data that have transformed our understanding of Earth’s celestial neighbor. While the old craft remains … Read more
a small spacecraft orbiting the moon Round and round: NASA’s veteran Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has been circling the moon since it first entered lunar orbit in June 2009. Over the 14 years since its launch, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft has produced proven images and data that have transformed our understanding of Earth’s celestial … Read more
By Jonathan Amos BBC science correspondent To play this content, please enable JavaScript or try another browser video caption, Watch: Europe’s latest Ariane-5 rocket takes off 6th July 2023, 02.26am BST Ariane-5, Europe’s heavy lift rocket, has flown its last mission. The vehicle, which supported the continent’s entry into space for nearly three decades, ended … Read more
Zoom in / Taranjit Sandhu, Indian ambassador to the United States, signs the Artemis Accords in Washington on June 21. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson watches from across the table. When the Indian ambassador to the United States joined his country in the Artemis Accords last month, he signaled that the world’s most populous country, with … Read more
Europe’s working rocket has flown for the last time. The mighty Ariane 5 launched today (July 5) for the latest mission in its legendary career, which began way back in 1996 and now includes 117 orbital liftoffs. Today’s mission began at 18:00 EDT (2200 GMT), when Ariane 5 launched from Europe’s Kourou Spaceport in French … Read more
Smaller planets could be born as gas and dust are squeezed between larger worlds like the filling in a cosmic sandwich. The recently suggested process — dubbed “sandwich planet formation” — would occur in the massive disks of planet-birth gas and dust that swirl around stars in their infancy called “protoplanetary disks.” About 4.5 billion … Read more
Time is relative, as they say, especially for mid-day meals. As special relativity shows, the measurement of any two clocks depends on their motion relative to each other. The higher their relative speeds, the slower each clock is relative to each other. So, since we see distant galaxies moving away from us, we should also … Read more
This image was taken by the Right Navigation Camera aboard NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity on Sol 3874 (June 30, 2023). Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech. Download image › Earth planning date: Friday June 30, 2023 Our last evaluation period on sols 3872 and 3873 was a “touch and go” plan: some contact science and other observations, followed … Read more
The violent merger between two stars that may have formed the helium-burning giant star Baekdu is depicted. The merger debris forms a disk from which the planet Halla formed, allowing the planets an unlikely survival around the star. Credit: WM Keck Observatory/Adam Makarenko 8 Ursae Minoris b, a giant planet, surprisingly survives despite the expansion … Read more
