Space

Scientists have identified the oldest impact site ever to scar our planet’s surface. The body that formed the Yarrabubba crater in the Australian outback struck Earth 2.229 billion years ago, and may have helped end a global ice age.

Science stands still for no one, and with a new year comes a new calendar of exciting events in spaceflight and exploration. New Atlas rounds up some of the most important milestones to look forward to in 2020.

NASA has revealed the nine finalist names for the space agency's Mars 2020 rover – and none of them are "Rovy McRoverface." Selected from 28,000 essays submitted by US elementary and high school students, the nine names will now go to a public poll.

There’s only so much oxygen we can take with us to the Moon, so figuring out how to produce it there is crucial. Now, ESA researchers have created a prototype device that can make oxygen out of the most common thing on the Moon – dirt.

SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 booster have completed an inflight launch escape demonstration. On January 19, 2020, the rocket and the unmanned capsule lifted off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center for the eight-minute final flight test.

ESA engineers have determined why the space agency's Huygens probe suddenly began spinning the wrong way 15 years ago as it descended to the surface of Saturn's largest moon, Titan. The reversal could have implications for future space missions.

NASA's myco-architecture project at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley is exploring the possibility that future inhabitants of the Moon and Mars, not to mention the Earth, may live in homes grown from fungus.

Boeing has released video footage from its Starliner spacecraft's first flight into space. Using feeds from a number of cameras, it showed what it was like inside the craft when the engine malfunction that forced an early return to Earth occurred.

In 2016, astronomers discovered a potentially habitable Earth-sized exoplanet just four light-years away – and new observations suggest it isn’t alone. A second planet may be orbiting Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Sun.

Researchers have discovered the oldest material on Earth – and it’s not from Earth. Tiny grains from a meteorite that fell in Australia were found to be between 5 and 7 billion years old, meaning they predate our planet, the Sun and the solar system.

The first of NASA's SLS deep space exploration rockets is on the move, rolling out of the space agency's Michoud Assembly Facility recently. The Boeing-built SLS Core Stage was put on the Pegasus barge to make its voyage to the Stennis Space Center.

Large clouds of dark matter have been indirectly detected before, but it should also form smaller clumps. Now Hubble observations have detected evidence of these small clumps for the first time, lending weight to a prevailing dark matter hypothesis.