The Hubble Space Telescope went into orbit in April 1990 with a primary mirror polished to the wrong shape by 2.2 micrometers, a figure smaller than a fiftieth…
NASA's Perseverance rover has driven close to 42 kilometres on the surface of Mars.
When the spectrograph data came back on XMM-VID1-2075 — a galaxy already known from earlier ground-based surveys to be one of the most massive in the early universe — the surprise was not its mass but its motion.
The Atacama Desert has long been useful to planetary scientists for a simple reason: it is not Mars, but it fails in some of the same ways Mars fails.
The sunlight warming your skin this morning began as energy deep inside the sun long before any of us were alive.
The International Space Station is moving at roughly 7.8 kilometres per second relative to the ground beneath it, completing an orbit every 90 to 93 minutes.
The photoreceptors at the back of your eyes are neurons. Not eye cells in some specialised sense, but actual brain tissue, the same lineage of cells that…
A binary star system locked in a tight 1.81-hour orbit is forcing astrophysicists to reconsider how matter behaves when trapped between ultracompact stellar remnants.
SpaceX launched its 34th cargo resupply mission to the International Space Station on May 15, and the Dragon capsule on top of the Falcon 9 was flying its sixth trip to orbit.
Astronomy has built pipelines that can sift through vast archives of sky imagery to find moving objects within days of their appearance.
The three largest U.S. wireless carriers have agreed in principle to form a joint venture for direct-to-device satellite connectivity, a move that satellite…
The Pentagon experiment that launched a generation of commercial space contractors is ending.
The figure most people remember from the 2018 ring rain study is the Olympic swimming pool.
The Greenland shark has become a fixture of popular science writing in the way of a small number of charismatic creatures: the immortal jellyfish, the deep-sea tube worm, the bristlecone pine.
The Moon is leaving. Not dramatically, not catastrophically, and not on any timescale that will inconvenience anyone reading this — but it is leaving, and the going rate is 3.8 centimetres per year.
Both Voyager spacecraft are now operating with the smallest sets of active science instruments in their nearly 49-year history.
