Space

NASA is turning to nuclear power will keep the lights on in tomorrow's Moon bases. The space agency has awarded US$15 million in contracts to three preliminary designs for 40-kW nuclear fission reactors to be tested on the lunar surface by 2030.

Scientists debate whether or not there’s life on Venus. A new Cambridge study has analyzed the Venusian atmosphere and found no sign of the chemical fingerprints microbes would be expected to produce – but it doesn’t rule out life on similar planets.

Astronomers have discovered bizarre “blue blobs” in space. These blobs are clusters of young, blue stars that are isolated from any parent galaxy, suggesting they formed from a galactic “belly flop.”

The most comprehensive picture of the Milky Way just got more detailed. Gaia's third data release covers almost 2 billion stars, including their makeup and movements, plus new catalogs of starquakes, binary systems, variable stars and other objects.

A six-year round trip to an asteroid has yielded unprecedented insights into the formation of the solar system. Scientists have analyzed samples returned from asteroid Ryugu, finding a detailed history starting with the oldest material ever found.

The James Webb Space Telescope has sustained a micrometeoroid impact to one of its mirror segments. While larger than the impacts anticipated during ground testing, the telescope should still be able to perform the tasks it was designed for.

NASA has awarded service contracts worth up to US$3.5 billion through 2034 to Axiom Space and Collins Aerospace to provide new space suits to the agency and private firms, for use on the International Space Station (ISS) and on the Moon.

Astronomers have discovered a strange neutron star that challenges our understanding of them – but may help unlock the mystery of fast radio bursts. The object spins far slower than any known neutron star, and gives off seven types of radio pulses.

Boeing's Starliner passenger spacecraft has successfully returned to Earth. At 5:49 pm CDT, the uncrewed capsule landed at the US Army's White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico at the end of a six-day mission to the International Space Station.

NASA has selected a fascinating new project for further development, known as the Diffractive Solar Sail. By bending light before it hits the sail, this device could propel spacecraft more efficiently than conventional propulsion technologies.

Boeing is back in the business of human spaceflight after its uncrewed CST-100 Starliner passenger spacecraft successfully docked with the International Space Station (ISS) at 8:28 pm EDT, fulfilling the key objective of Orbital Flight Test-2 (OFT-2).

The 45-year-old Voyager 1 deep space probe is showing its age as NASA engineers try to determine why it is sending back invalid telemetry data from its attitude control system as it hurtles through interstellar space, never to return.

NASA has released a huge new report that astronomers are calling Hubble’s magnum opus. Analyzing 30 years of data from the famous space telescope, the new study makes the most precise measurement yet of how fast the universe is expanding.

On its third attempt, Boeing's CST-100 Starliner spacecraft reached Earth orbit today. At 6:55 pm EDT, the uncrewed passenger capsule launched from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket.

It looks as though NASA's InSight Mars lander's days are numbered after the space agency announced that the spacecraft is gradually losing power due to dust building up on its solar panels, already reducing their output by 90 percent.