Dreams of exploring the cosmos have crashed up against the harsh reality of budget cuts in the United States. Congressional approval of the 2024 federal budget earlier this year left NASA with roughly half a billion dollars less than the agency had in 2023 — and Mars science has taken the biggest hit.
Engineers are scrambling to figure out how a long-planned mission to bring samples back from the Red Planet might still be accomplished. Probes intended for other planets
The world needs urgent regulations to prevent the ‘Wild West’ space resources race from spiralling out of control in to war, a British expert who worked on NASA’s Mars mission has warned.
Several countries have recently set their sights on the Moon, which is a multi-quadrillion-pound hotbed of unearthed riches from rare Earth metals used in smartphones to helium that could perhaps provide an invaluable source of energy.
But there has been unease among scientists about how the moon’s resources
It’s official: NASA’s OSIRIS-Rex spacecraft snagged 121.6 grams of pristine space rocks when it bopped the asteroid Bennu four years ago, more than double the mission’s official science goal, the agency confirmed February 15.
Launched in 2016, OSIRIS-Rex is NASA’s first mission to collect samples from an asteroid and return them to Earth so scientists can study our solar system’s origins. After performing its grab-and-go procedure from the diamond-shaped Bennu, the spacecraft dropped its canister into our atmosphere last year
After nearly three years, NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter, the first spacecraft to undertake a powered flight on another world, has ended its mission. Officials at the agency confirmed on January 25 that the history-making quad-copter has sustained damage to one of its rotor blades and is no longer capable of flying.
“While we knew this day was inevitable, it doesn’t make it any easier,” said Lori Glaze, NASA’s planetary science division director, during a news conference on the status of the
After years of anticipation, NASA finally unveiled its latest experimental aircraft this month.
Dubbed the ‘Son of Concorde’, the $247.5 million X-59 plane is capable of cruising at 937 miles per hour – faster than the speed of sound.
It’s the latest in a long line of what’s known at NASA as ‘X-planes’ – experimental aircraft with weird and wonderful designs.
As the past 75 years has shown, X-planes can break milestones and shape the future of aeronautics, or be
2023 shaped up to be an amazing year for space missions, from NASA’s return of fragments of a faraway asteroid to India landing on the moon’s south pole.
And now it seems the world’s space agencies and billion-dollar private firms are already looking forward to an even more prolific year.
Among them are NASA, which is finally returning to the moon after 40 years, and Blue Origin which is sending an all-female crew into orbit.
There’s also the chance of
Er ist vielleicht nicht die erste Katze im Weltraum – diese Ehre geht 1963 an eine französische Katze namens Félicette –, aber am Montag gewann ein orange getigerter Kater namens Taters einen wohl größeren Preis: das erste Katzenvideo im Weltraum.
Die Nasa schickte ein 15-sekündiges Video von Taters in Ultra-HD, das von einer Sonde aus fast 19 Millionen Meilen zurück zur Erde zurücklegte.
Taters, der zu einem Mitarbeiter des Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) der NASA gehört, jagt im Video einen
Da Halloween immer näher rückt, beteiligt sich die NASA an den gruseligen Machenschaften und veröffentlicht ein neues Bild eines gruselig aussehenden „Gesichts“ auf dem Jupiter.
Das Bild wurde letzten Monat von der Juno-Sonde der US-Raumfahrtbehörde während ihres 54. nahen Vorbeiflugs am Gasriesen aufgenommen.
Es fängt Jupiters stimmungsvolle Wolken ein, die ein eher ungewöhnliches Muster bilden,
NASA’s highly-anticipated Psyche asteroid mission has been delayed by 24 hours because of bad weather.
The US space agency was targeting today for lift-off, but will now attempt the launch at 10:19 ET (15:19 BST) tomorrow from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Psyche is a spacecraft built to explore a 4.5 billion-year-old asteroid called 16 Psyche, which scientists think may be packed full of iron, nickel and gold with a value in excess of $10,000 quadrillion (£8,072 quadrillion).
NASA scientists are just beginning to reveal details about roughly 250 grams of dust and rocks brought back to Earth from the asteroid Bennu. The samples are the result of the first U.S. mission to return a sample from an asteroid, and the largest cache of material ever collected beyond the orbit of the moon.
This mission is the beginning of “a new era of exploration, and this is the era of sample science,” said Makenzie Lystrup, director of NASA’s
