Atomic oxygen, the most common particle in low Earth orbit, chemically erodes spacecraft surfaces continuously. The ISS survives only because every external material has been chosen, coated, and scheduled for replacement against this slow molecular attack.
The U.S. military's nuclear detection satellites started catching mysterious gamma-ray flashes in 1967 that did not match any known weapon signature. The discovery stayed classified for six years before it became clear the flashes were exploding stars billions of light-years away.
The James Webb Space Telescope has given astronomers a sharper look at how young star clusters escape their birthplaces, and the result cuts against the simple intuition that smaller clusters should clear out faster.
In December 1995, the Hubble Space Telescope spent ten days staring at a small, deliberately unremarkable patch of sky.
Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, has a denser atmosphere than Earth and a surface where rain, rivers, and seas are made of liquid hydrocarbons rather than water.
This is accurate, and a spacecraft has already done it. Enceladus, a moon of Saturn only about 500 kilometres across, has a global ocean of liquid water under a shell of ice.
On the morning of 30 June 1908, an object from space exploded above the basin of the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in central Siberia.
Both halves of this claim are well supported, and neither rests on a single study.
The core of this story holds up. On 14 November 1969, the Saturn V carrying Apollo 12 was struck by lightning twice in its first minute of flight, the…
For the first time since the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s origins in the 1930s, Caltech’s hold on one of the most important institutions in American robotic space exploration is no longer automatic.
In Western Australia's outback near Exmouth, an array of parabolic dishes spread across the landscape is already tracking satellites in geostationary orbit for the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia.
The site is called Tanis, in the Hell Creek Formation of southwestern North Dakota.
The claim is true, though the version of it that gets repeated most often is softer than it sounds.
An international team of researchers has identified a new fuel-efficient route between Earth and the Moon that also avoids the kind of communications blackout the Artemis II crew experienced when their spacecraft slipped behind the lunar far side in April.
Every Moon mission has to solve two problems at once: how to spend as little propellant as possible, and how to keep the spacecraft connected to Earth when lunar geometry gets in the way.
The retroreflectors left on the Moon by Apollo 11, 14, and 15 still return laser pulses fired from Earth, and 57 years of data have measured the Moon's recession at 3.8 centimeters per year while confirming Einstein's general relativity to extraordinary precision.
