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Robotic Spaceflight

Why we need in-orbit refueling to return to the Moon

Robotic Spaceflight

U.S. confirms it has weapons in orbit

Your backyard telescope is just the beginning

What's Launching This Week

Europe launches two Earth-observation satellites amidst a busy week for China

A detailed telescopic photograph of a face-on barred spiral galaxy, showing tightly wound blue spiral arms laced with pink star-forming regions surrounding a soft, glowing golden core. Several distant background galaxies are visible scattered across the black field, and a bright foreground star with diffraction spikes is visible to the left.

Why do bars form in some spiral galaxies, but not in others?

What's Launching This Week

SpaceX closes out SES’s O3b mPower constellation

An artist's illustration of 'Oumuamua, the first known interstellar object detected passing through the solar system, depicted as a long, thin, reddish-brown elongated rock tumbling through space near a bright glowing sun. A diffuse dust or gas trail streams behind it, and the starry black background of deep space surrounds the scene.

Why aren’t free-floating planets captured when they fly past stars?

Robotic Spaceflight

Scientists watch as two satellites burn

Human Spaceflight, Science

Microbes may make it on the Moon

A composite photograph showing a lunar analemma — a sequence of Moon images captured at the same time over multiple nights — tracing a graceful figure-eight shaped arc across the night sky above the illuminated skyline of Giza, Egypt, with the three Great Pyramids silhouetted against the city's orange glow. The Moon's phases progress and change in size throughout the sequence, reflecting its varying distance and illumination over the course of the observation period.

Solar System, The Moon

Why doesn’t the moonrise time change by the same amount of time each day?

Robotic Spaceflight, Science

Roman Space Telescope lifts off

What's Launching This Week

Norway, India, and New Zealand target launches as Starlink continues