In New York City on Tuesday, Feb. 16, 2021, the Empire State Building is illuminated in red to celebrate this Thursday's scheduled landing on Mars of NASA's Perseverance rover. A key objective for Perseverance’s mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the... Continue Reading →
Space debris is an issue of global concern that threatens our continued use of near-Earth space for the benefit of humankind. To raise awareness about this growing problem, ESA and the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) have created a series... Continue Reading →
In brush strokes of interstellar dust and glowing gas, this beautiful skyscape is painted across the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy near the northern end of the Great Rift and the constellation Cygnus the Swan. Composed over a decade with 400 hours of image data, the broad... Continue Reading →
Sea salt embedded in the dusty surface of Mars and lofted into the planet’s atmosphere has led to the discovery of hydrogen chloride – the first time the ESA-Roscosmos ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter has detected a new gas. The spacecraft... Continue Reading →
Astronomers may have found our galaxy’s first example of an unusual kind of stellar explosion. This discovery, made with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, adds to the understanding of how some stars shatter and seed the universe with elements critical for... Continue Reading →
n this image from 2018, NASA astronaut Jeanette Epps trains in a U.S. spacesuit at the Johnson Space Center. Epps is assigned to NASA’s Boeing Starliner-1 mission, the first operational crewed flight of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft on a mission to the International Space Station. She... Continue Reading →
A bright foreground star isn’t enough to distract from the grandeur of the galaxy UGC 3885, captured here by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. While this foreground star is incredibly bright to Hubble’s eye, it does not outshine the details... Continue Reading →
Five, four, three, two, one…. FIREWORKS! The countdown to a new year is in many ways a defining moment for our lives on Earth. Our age, our seasons, filing our taxes… – all depend on the duration of Earth’s orbit... Continue Reading →
Massive stars in our Milky Way Galaxy live spectacular lives. Collapsing from vast cosmic clouds, their nuclear furnaces ignite and create heavy elements in their cores. After a few million years, the enriched material is blasted back into interstellar space where star... Continue Reading →
