NASA

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.

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.

All of NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the World Meteorological Organization and the UK Met Office have determined 2019 to be the second warmest year on record, with the last decade confirmed to be the hottest of all.

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.

NASA's TESS telescope has already notched up a few noteworthy achievements. Its latest feat, however, is also its most significant, with the space telescope having now identified its first Earth-sized exoplanet in the habitable zone.

Scientists have now come up with a new way of quickly identifying oxygen in the atmospheres of distant worlds, with plans to apply the technique to the observations of NASA's James Webb Space Telescope which is slated to launch next year.

NASA has released a new panoramic infrared image of the center of the Milky Way. With data gathered by the Boeing 747-based SOFIA observatory, the image reveals new details of certain regions that have been traditionally tricky to capture.