Space

Has life ever existed on Mars? Humankind has sent more than a dozen spacecraft to investigate, with some built to dig into the surface and others to roam its dusty terrain. The ExoMars 2020 mission will be the first to do both.

More than a billion miles beyond Pluto drifts a bizarre snowman-shaped world that was visited by the New Horizons probe at the beginning of the year. Originally nicknamed Ultima Thule, NASA has now officially named this Kuiper belt object “Arrokoth.”

Aerojet Rocketdyne and NASA's Advanced Electric Propulsion System (AEPS) thruster that will be used on NASA's Gateway orbiting lunar outpost has passed a major milestone, completing its first full-power test, running at 12.5 kW.

On November 14, 1969, the second manned mission to land on the Moon lifted off from Cape Kennedy. Four months after the historic Apollo 11 landing, it was the first true manned exploration mission to the lunar surface. But why return to the Moon?

Data from the Curiosity rover positioned within the Gale Crater on Mars has revealed repeating patterns of wild seasonal swings in oxygen levels, something mission scientists neither expected or are currently able to explain.

JAXA's Hayabusa2 asteroid explorer is on its way home to Earth. The unmanned deep-space probe today fired its chemical thrusters to push it away from the asteroid Ryugu at a relative velocity of 9.2 cm/s (3.6 in/s), with the successful burn confirmed by mission control shortly after.

Astronomers have discovered a star known as S5-HVS1, travelling at an incredible 6 million km/h (3.7 million mph). That not only makes it the fastest known star, but it’s fast enough to fling it right out of the galaxy.

The Mars 2020 rover will be touching down in Jezero Crater and now there’s more evidence this was a good choice. Two new studies have found that the landing site is rich in minerals that could preserve fossils of ancient microbes and other lifeforms.

For the first time, atmospheric chemistry and 3D climate modeling have been combined in a way that could help identify planets beyond our solar system which could host life.

Central to SpaceX's mission of making rocket launches as cheap as possible is recovering and recycling as many components as possible, and it today took another significant step toward this aim, flying a recovered payload fairing for the first time.

Engineers have mated the fourth and final Space Shuttle-era engine to the core stage of NASA’s first Space Launch System Moon rocket. NASA hopes to use the super heavy launch vehicle to return astronauts to the Moon before striking out for Mars.

Scientists generally agree that the universe is expanding, but how fast is up for debate. Now, astrophysicists have come up with a new figure for the Hubble Constant by studying how gamma rays interact with the background radiation of the universe.