Amazon is set to launch two satellite prototypes for its Project Kuiper network, which will eventually number more than 3,200 orbiters. Project Kuiper could become a rival to SpaceX’s Starlink constellation, which is now nearly 4,800 strong. Amazon’s launch is planned for 2 pm Eastern time today, with a backup …

Consider the possibility of alien plants. After all, plenty of exoplanets likely have conditions friendly to the development of plants, even if evolution there never makes it as far as complex organisms and animals. But if moss, algae, and lichen envelop lush exoplanets in the faraway realms of the Milky …

On Sunday, a capsule carrying a one-of-a-kind sample from the near-Earth asteroid Bennu careened through the atmosphere and landed in the Utah desert. But the OSIRIS-REx mission isn’t quite over: That precious cargo needs to be kept safe, then carefully opened one step at a time, before any science can …

Seven years after it left for the near-Earth asteroid Bennu, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is returning with a celestial souvenir. On the morning of Sunday, September 24, as it passes by Earth the probe will release a canister holding about 9 ounces of space rock. The container will plummet through the …

The blazing surface of the sun froths with an extremely hot electrically charged gas called plasma. The temperature at the edge of this cosmic furnace runs at about 5,500 degrees Celsius, but here’s the real puzzle: Somehow the sun’s atmosphere, which surrounds that surface like a halo, is 150 times …

Seventy-six years after the infamous Roswell incident, when a high-altitude balloon—or something—crashed in southeastern New Mexico, the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has now officially weighed in on UFO sightings. Don’t get too excited: They haven’t proven, or disproven, the existence of aliens. Instead, the report released today …

An influential group of researchers is making the case for new ways to search the skies for signs of alien societies. They argue that current methods could be biased by human-centered thinking, and that it’s time to take advantage of data-driven, machine learning techniques. The team of 22 scientists released …

As the dust settled following SpaceX’s brief, explosive test launch of Starship in April, both the company and the Federal Aviation Administration dug into investigating the aftermath. The gigantic rocket’s flight lasted just four minutes before it blew up near SpaceX’s Boca Chica launch site on the Texas coast. Images …

Nearly one year ago, NASA flung the DART spacecraft into the asteroid Dimorphos at 14,000 miles per hour. It was the first test to see whether they could slightly deflect a space rock’s trajectory using a high-speed collision, a technique that could be used to protect Earth from future killer …

Today, India’s Chandrayaan-3 became the first spacecraft to successfully land near the lunar south pole, and India became the fourth country to make a soft landing anywhere on lunar soil, following the former Soviet Union, the United States, and China. The robotic vehicle touched down at 8:33 am Eastern time, …