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NASA still targeting moon's south pole for 2024 crew landing

NASA is definitely targeting the moon's south pole for a crewed landing in 2024 — but that timeline will be difficult to achieve if Congress doesn't open its purse strings, and fast, agency chief Jim Bridenstine said. During a presentation with NASA's Lunar ...

Blue Origin will launch its next New Shepard suborbital test flight Thursday

Blue Origin's reusable New Shepard spacecraft will take to the skies this week for the first time in nine months. Advertisement. New Shepard, which is designed to ferry people and payloads to suborbital space and back, will launch on an uncrewed test flight ...

Astronauts take shelter as space station dodges orbital junk

The International Space Station just dodged a fast-moving hunk of orbiting junk. Advertisement. Controllers maneuvered the station away from a potential collision with a piece of debris today (Sept. 22) at 5:19 p.m. EDT (2119 GMT). They did so by firing the ...

NASA and US Space Force team up for planetary defense, moon trips and more

NASA and the United States Space Force are banding together for the future of human spaceflight. As the agency moves forward with its Artemis program, which aims to return humans to the lunar surface by 2024, NASA is also working on its relationship with ...

'Pi planet' alien world takes 3.14 days to orbit its star

A newfound Earth-size exoplanet drives home the close ties between math and astronomy. Scientists have found an alien world that orbits its host star every 3.14 Earth days, a close approximation of the famous mathematical constant pi, the ratio between a ...

Can ripples on the sun help predict solar flares?

An X-class solar flare (X9.3) emitted on September 6, 2017, and captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory in extreme ultraviolet light. Image courtesy of NASA/GSFC/SDO. Solar flares are violent explosions on the sun that fling out high-energy charged ...

NASA's new Mars rover will use X-rays to hunt fossils

In this illustration, NASA's Perseverance Mars rover uses the Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry (PIXL). Located on the turret at the end of the rover's robotic arm, the X-ray spectrometer will help search for signs of ancient microbial life in rocks.

The first ultra-hot Neptune, LTT 9779b, is one of nature's improbable planets

An international team of astronomers, including a group from the University of Warwick, have discovered the first Ultra Hot Neptune planet orbiting the nearby star LTT 9779. The world orbits so close to its star that its year lasts only 19 hours, meaning the ...

Why do we sleep? The answer may change right before we turn 3.

Humans spend about a third of our lives sleeping, and scientists have long debated why slumber takes up such a huge slice of our time. Now, a new study hints that our main reason for sleeping starts off as one thing, then changes at a surprisingly specific ...

'Grand claims' of life on Venus lack evidence, skeptics say

Last week, a team of researchers told the world that they had detected a molecule in the upper cloud layers of Venus typically only created by living creatures here on Earth. The blockbuster announcement of finding phosphine in the clouds of Venus made a ...