As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.

SPACE: What Does It Take to Be a Moon?

Phobos - NASA

From Earth’s rocky, pockmarked satellite to ice-covered ocean worlds, our solar system is chock-full of moons. Some planets have dozens of them; others don’t have any. Astronomers find these satellites very interesting — geologically and, potentially, astrobiologically — and are eager to send probes to visit lunar destinations, such as Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus. So it might surprise you to discover that, currently, there is no scientific definition of a moon. The scholars in charge of such an undertaking would be the International Astronomical Union (IAU), which approves and certifies the names of celestial objects, planetary scientist … Read more

NASA Spacecraft Poised to Find Thousands of Alien Worlds

alien planet - live science

Within just 50 light-years from Earth, there are about 1,560 stars, likely orbited by several thousand planets. About a thousand of these extrasolar planets — known as exoplanets — may be rocky and have a composition similar to Earth’s. Some may even harbor life. Over 99% of these alien worlds remain undiscovered — but this is about to change. With NASA’s new exoplanet-hunter space telescope TESS, the all-sky search is on for possibly habitable planets close to our solar system. TESS — orbiting Earth every 13.7 days — and ground-based telescopes are poised to find hundreds of planets over the … Read more

SPACE: Are We Being Watched By An Alien Satellite? Probably Not. But…

Black Knight - NASA

Sometimes the introduction of a news report will stop you in your tracks, forcing you to reread in fear you didn’t quite grasp its point the first time. That was certainly the case when Mail Online published a story on Mar. 21, 2017: “An alien satellite set up more than 12,000 years ago to spy on humans has been shot down by elite soldiers from the illuminati, UFO hunters claim.”  And with that, the conspiracy surrounding the so-called “Black Knight” satellite appeared to be very much alive. It’s been 120 years since conspiracists believed the existence of the Black Knight was recorded. … Read more

Will the First Human on Mars Be a Woman?

mars - pixabay

When NASA sends humans to the moon for the first time in more than half a century, one lucky astronaut will go down in history for becoming the first woman on the moon. Then it won’t be long before we see the first woman on Mars, and she just might beat the first man there, according to NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine. “We could very well see the first person on Mars be a woman,” Bridenstine told reporters on Friday (Oct. 18) during a news conference about the first all-woman spacewalk. “I think that could very well be a milestone,” he … Read more

SPACE: Astronomers May Have Found Something Traveling Faster Than Light (Sort Of)

FTL travel - NASA

In a distant corner of the universe, something is traveling faster than light.  No, the laws of physics aren’t being violated: It’s still true that nothing can travel faster than light in the vacuum of empty space. But when light travels through matter, like interstellar gas or a soup of charged particles, it slow downs, meaning other matter might overtake it. And that may explain the weird symmetry in pulses of some of the most energetic light in the universe, called gamma-ray bursts.  These cryptic bursts — bright flashes of gamma-ray light that come from faraway galaxies — form when … Read more

SPACE: NASA is Mad at Elon Musk

Starship MK1 - SpaceX

SpaceX has never flown a person into space in its Crew Dragon, its first crew-capable spacecraft. But already the company is showing off its much bigger, much shinier cousin: the Starship, built in Boca Chica, a coastal village at the southeastern tip of Texas, as part of a plan to carry giant crews into deep space. And NASA’s administrator is bristling. That’s because, even though the Crew Dragon — which consists of a capsule for carrying cargo and crew into space on top of a Falcon Heavy rocket — is still very much in the works, it’s well behind schedule. … Read more

SPACE: Life on Mars

Mars - NASA

Mars may seem barren and inhospitable today, but long ago the Red Planet once looked very different. Once upon a time, Mars was warmer than it is now, and covered in rivers, lakes and seas. There’s no way of saying for sure whether Martians ever existed, experts say. Still, there’s mounting evidence that Mars was not only habitable in theory, but actually home to some kind of extraterrestrial life. It’s even possible that remnants of that life still lurk undiscovered beneath Mars’ surface. Here are six reasons why astrobiologists believe in the possibility of life on Mars.  River Valleys and … Read more

SPACE: NASA Proposes “Starshade” to Hunt for Alien Worlds

Starshade exoplanet-hunting missions may be technologically daunting, but they’re not beyond NASA’s reach, recent research suggests. Such a mission would employ a space telescope and a separate craft flying about 25,000 miles (40,000 kilometers) ahead of it. This latter probe would be equipped with a large, flat, petaled shade designed to block starlight, potentially allowing the telescope to directly image orbiting alien worlds as small as Earth that would otherwise be lost in the glare. (Instruments called coronagraphs, which have been installed on multiple ground-based and space telescopes, work on the same light-blocking principle. But coronagraphs are incorporated into the … Read more

Is Mars Venting Its Water Into Space?

Mars

There’s a hole in the Martian atmosphere that opens once every two years, venting the planet’s limited water supply into space — and dumping the rest of the water at the planet’s poles. That’s the explanation advanced by a team of Russian and German scientists who studied the odd behavior of water on the Red Planet. Earthbound scientists can see that there’s water vapor high in the Martian atmosphere, and that water is migrating to the planet’s poles. But until now, there was no good explanation for how the Martian water cycle works, or why the once-drenched planet is now … Read more

NASA Probe Captures Amazing Images of Asteroid

Bennu

You’ve never seen an asteroid like this before. This technicolor marvel is a compilation of more than 11 million measurements of an asteroid called Bennu, all gathered by a NASA probe called OSIRIS-REx. That spacecraft arrived in December and since then has been conducting a carefully planned survey of the space rock. The 3-dimensional view is based on data gathered in February and shows the surface height of Bennu, with a nearly 200-foot (60-meter) difference in height between the lowland dark blue areas and the red peaks. Now, the spacecraft has just entered a phase called the Detailed Survey: Equatorial … Read more