Tag Archives: space

A white spacecraft, lightly toasted like a marshmallow and smelling of singed metal, fell out of the night sky early on Sunday morning and splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico not all that far from Key West. The darkened waters there were carefully chosen from among dozens of potential …

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. To understand the universe, scientists look to its outliers. “You always want to know about the extreme cases—the special cases that lie at the edge,” said Carsten Gundlach, a mathematical physicist at the University of Southampton. Black holes are the …

The far outskirts of our galaxy are teeming with activity. Astronomers pointed the powerful James Webb Space Telescope at a distant zone dubbed the “Extreme Outer Galaxy,” and zoomed in on dense cosmic clouds containing clusters of stars. In unprecedented resolution of this region, they spotted vibrant star formation, and …

Crew onboard the Russian Soyuz capsule, a flight to the International Space Station (ISS) that took place on Sept. 11, became record-breaking space residents this week, as humanity waves up to the now 19 humans living and working in space. It’s the largest group living in space concurrently in history. …

This story originally appeared on WIRED en Español and has been translated from Spanish. C/2023 A3, also known as Tsuchinshan–ATLAS and considered “the comet of the century,” will appear in all its splendor in our sky during September and October 2024. Due to its characteristics, astronomers believe it will be …

The most volcanic world in our solar system has sprouted a new volcano. And its lava flows are enormous. Jupiter’s molten moon Io has been surveyed by a number of passing spacecraft, allowing planetary scientists to see changes on the surface. Recently, NASA‘s Juno mission made the closest swings by …

Jay Buckey flew to space as a NASA astronaut in 1998. Decades later, he watched one of his experiments leave Earth on a SpaceX rocket. The space company’s Polaris Dawn endeavor — a private venture funded by billionaire Jared Isaacman — is a five-day mission around Earth featuring an ambitious …

For the first time in history, a private citizen has left the confines of a spaceship while flying through space — an exercise that before now was only performed by trained astronauts. The unprecedented commercial spacewalk was part of SpaceX‘s Polaris Dawn mission, which sent four civilians into orbit to …

SpaceX‘s Polaris Dawn mission finally launched on Tuesday, after a series of delays pushed back its commencement date. Now the crew of the private spaceflight are scheduled to take the first ever commercial spacewalk — and the entire thing will be livestreamed so we can watch it here from Earth. …

One of the most ambitious space tourism missions in history has launched, with the all-commercial crew set to hit a number of milestones during its five days in space, including the first-ever privately funded human space walk. The mission, called Polaris Dawn, took off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in …