A couple of photos shot from the International Space Station (ISS) over the weekend will probably remind you more of Mars than Earth. Shared by NASA astronaut and current ISS crew member Shane Kimbrough, the beautiful images (below) actually show sand dunes in Saudi Arabia and neighboring Yemen. Related Videos “Thought we might be on…
RC Car drives on WATER for Guinness World Records title! As Guinness World Records go, this is surely one of the weirder ones. It’s not clear exactly what compelled Mike Stallone to go for the “greatest distance driven over water by an RC (remote-controlled) car” record, but go for it he did. Stallone attempted the…
It is exactly a year since SpaceX’s historic Demo-2 mission that saw crewed launches and landings return to U.S. soil for the first time since the Space Shuttle program ended in 2011. The mission also marked the first astronaut use of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft, which carried NASA’s Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken to the…
This image shows the spiral galaxy NGC 5037, in the constellation of Virgo. First documented by William Herschel in 1785, the galaxy lies about 150 million light-years away from Earth. Despite this distance, we can see the delicate structures of gas and dust within the galaxy in extraordinary detail. This detail is possible using Hubble’s…
SpaceX founder Elon Musk says travel to Mars is within reach, with the possibility of having 1 million people living on Mars within 100 years. SpaceX isn’t alone in working toward reaching Mars, however. In fact, there are quite a number of missions, both crewed and uncrewed, that are currently planned or under proposal from…
Transformable lunar robot (left: before transformation, right: after transformation) JAXA The moon could soon be visited by a jolly round robotic friend. The Japanese Space Agency, JAXA, has announced plans to build a transforming lunar rover to explore the moon ahead of its planned crewed mission there. To travel across the lunar regolith — the…
Chemical space. Naomi Johnson, Lee Cronin When it comes to searching for life beyond our planet, one of the most common approaches is to look for what are called biosignatures: Indications of chemicals that are produced by lifeforms, such as the recent possible detection of phosphine on Venus. But this requires making a lot of…
Threads of superheated gas and magnetic fields are weaving a tapestry of energy at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. A new image of this new cosmic masterpiece was made using a giant mosaic of data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa. X-ray: NASA/CXC/UMass/Q.D. Wang; Radio: NRF/SARAO/MeerKAT)…
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover captured these clouds just after sunset on March 19, 2021, the 3,063rd Martian day, or sol, of the rover’s mission. The image is made up of 21 individual images stitched together and color corrected so that the scene appears as it would to the human eye. NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS Mars has a super-thin…
Ten areas in the sky were selected as “deep fields” that the Dark Energy Camera imaged several times during the survey, providing a glimpse of distant galaxies and helping determine their 3D distribution in the cosmos. The image is teeming with galaxies — in fact, nearly every single object in this image is a galaxy….