Long-range space exploration is currently hamstrung by having to accelerate spacecraft in comparative fits and starts using rocket engines that can only fire for a few minutes at a time, followed by months, years, and even decades of the spacecraft coasting from planet to planet. However, a propulsion method thatread more
Comet Atlas may have fizzled as it came ’round the Sun, but its replacement, C/2020 F8—better known as Comet SWAN—has fared better in its approach to the center of the Solar System, and although it is likely to become just bright enough to be visible to the naked eye, skywatchers willread more
NASA’s Curiosity Rover has detected an organic molecule in Mars’ Gale Crater that is typically associated with fossil fuels and fungi on Earth, another potential sign that life once existed—or continues to exist—somewhere on or in the Red Planet. Additionally, the agency’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter returned a picture of an unusual hole in theread more
Russian scientists believe that a piece of decorative glass that sat in the bottom of a schoolteacher’s fish tank for the past 35 years might have been a part of the meteor that caused the Tunguska event, a multi-megaton explosion that occurred over Russia’s remote Tunguska region in 1908. Ifread more