NASA Archives | Page 2 of 15

The One Technological Issue That Is Holding Nuclear Rockets Back

NASA NASA plans to send crewed missions to Mars over the next decade — but the 140 million-mile (225 million-kilometer) journey to the red planet could take several months to years round trip. This relatively long transit time is a result of the use of traditional chemical rocket fuel. An alternative technology to the chemically […]

Can NASA Really Send Humans to Mars In the Next Decade?

NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell University/Arizona State University via AP NASA plans to send humans on a scientific round trip to Mars potentially as early as 2035. The trip will take about six to seven months each way and will cover up to 250 million miles (402 million kilometers) each way. The astronauts may spend as many as 500 […]

Jupiter’s Great Red Spot Is Moving In a ‘Very Unexpected’ Way, Bewildering Astronomers

For three months, the Hubble Space Telescope stared at the famous blemish on Jupiter. What the veteran spacecraft found surprised NASA scientists. Jupiter’s Great Red Spot (GRS) is “jiggling like a bowl of gelatin,” according to press releases from both NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA). This unstable motion appeared to astronomers in a […]

A Coronal Mass Ejection Just Slammed Into Earth’s Magnetosphere — Here’s Where You’ll See the Auroras

Sjoerd van der Wal/Getty Images News/Getty Images Today’s aurora alert proves the Sun is more dynamic than many may realize. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center announced today that the Sun had successfully triggered categorically “severe” conditions in our upper atmosphere. As a result, auroras may be visible as far south […]

What Did NASA’s DART Mission Really Do To That Asteroid? We Are About To Find Out

ESA The European Space Agency’s Hera spacecraft is on its way to check out the damage NASA’s DART mission did to an asteroid called Dimorphos. Hera launched aboard a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral on Monday, just days ahead of Hurricane Milton. While the monster hurricane sweeps across the middle of Florida, Hera will […]

A Retired Cold War Spy Plane Discovered Something Really Weird About Thunderstorms

NASA NASA sent a retired Cold War spy plane on a storm-chasing mission, and it discovered that big thunderstorms are very radioactive. Large thunderstorms produce so much gamma radiation that the clouds are actually glowing with it, according to a recent study, which used NASA’s ER-2 research plane to study gamma rays in tropical thunderstorms. […]

This Eerily Lopsided Planet Has Weather That Technically Shouldn’t Exist

The atmosphere of gas planet WASP-107b is a bit lopsided, and that could teach astronomers something new about alien weather. WASP-107b is a strikingly fluffy planet, only about a tenth as dense as Jupiter. It also turns out to be slightly lopsided; the planet’s atmosphere is a few hundred miles taller on one side than […]

Look! Astronomers Have Never Seen A Pair Of Supermassive Black Holes So Close Together

Astronomers recently captured two supermassive black holes in a hundred-million-year death spiral toward an epic collision. The two black holes are near the center of a galaxy shaped by the aftermath of a recent merger between two smaller galaxies, and their fate offers a preview of what might happen to Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black […]

So, Would Starliner Have Safely Brought Its Astronauts Home?

— NASA/Getty Images News/Getty Images Starliner is finally home. But its crew — astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams — are not. Could Starliner have safely carried them? The Boeing spacecraft’s initial 8-day flight ballooned into a months-long saga shortly after launch. The aerospace company and NASA, who are collaborating for the agency’s Commercial Crew […]

Look: Mysterious Glass Beads Found On the Moon Contain Hidden Clues About Its Past

Three tiny beads of glass reveal that the Moon was volcanically active much more recently than geologists thought. Amid samples of Moon dust from China’s Chang’e-5 lander, a team of geologists recently found volcanic glass that formed in an eruption about 120 million years ago — long after the last known volcanic eruptions on the […]