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The astronauts and cosmonauts aboard the International Space Station are marking the New Year, becoming only the 37th crew in history to be in space as Earth begins another revolution around the Sun. Expedition 66 crew members Raja Chari, Tom Marshburn, Kayla Barron and Mark Vande Hei of NASA, Matthias Maurer of the European Space … Read more
One of the James Webb Space Telescope’s most nail-biting deployment steps is safely in the books. The $10 billion observatory unfurled its huge sunshield on Friday (Dec. 31), carefully unfolding the five-layer structure by sequentially deploying two booms. “Shine bright like a diamond. With the successful deployment of our right sunshield mid-boom, or ‘arm,’ Webb’s … Read more
For something that’s meant to lend order to our lives, the modern Western calendar has a messy history. The mess, in part, comes about because of the difficulty of coordinating the orbits of celestial bodies with the cycles of day and night, and the passage of the seasons. The year measured by the earth’s … Read more
Our planet’s convoluted history of evolving life has spawned countless weird and wonderful creatures, but none excite evolutionary biologists – or divide taxonomists – quite like crabs. When researchers attempted to reconcile the evolutionary history of crabs in all their raucous glory just earlier this year, they arrived at the conclusion that the defining … Read more
The International Space Station is a state-of-the-art laboratory where astronauts perform hundreds of important experiments every year — but that does not mean that life on orbit is all work and no play for the outpost’s crews. In between their other assignments, NASA astronauts take part in in-flight educational downlinks with schools around the country, answering … Read more
The White House has given NASA a New Year’s Eve “go” to continue operations on board the International Space Station through 2030, granting the orbital outpost a six-year life extension. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson was directed by the Biden-Harris administration to work with the agency’s partners, including the European Space Agency (ESA), Canadian Space Agency, … Read more
Orbiting more than 300 miles (480 kilometers) over Earth and separated by tens of millions of light-years from many of the interstellar objects it studies, the Hubble Space Telescope takes “working remotely” to a new extreme. Even as the world below grappled with another pandemic year, weird and wonderful space discoveries flooded in from above, … Read more
The helmets featured across the Star Wars universe are right up there with lightsabers as far as prestige and instant recognizability go. It’s no surprise then that toymaker Lego, which has been manufacturing building sets inspired by Star Wars for more than two decades, offers several amazing build-and-display models of famous headpieces. Whether you are … Read more
This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Aaron McGowan, Principal Lecturer in Physics and Astronomy, Rochester Institute of Technology If you ask a physicist like me to explain how the world works, my lazy answer might be: “It follows the Standard Model.” … Read more
2021 was a banner year for NASA and the rest of the spaceflight community around the world. From landing on Mars to launching private citizens into space, and everything in between, this year has seen many historic milestones and next-giant leaps. Here we take a look back at all the incredible moments in spaceflight and … Read more