earth

Making spaceflight history: John Glenn orbited Earth 60 years ago today

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The United States’ human spaceflight program got a much-needed shot in the arm 60 years ago today. On Feb. 20, 1962, NASA astronaut John Glenn launched from Florida’s Cape Canaveral inside a tiny capsule named Friendship 7. The Mercury spacecraft circled Earth three times, ultimately splashing down near the Turks and Caicos Islands four hours … Read more

Ancient ‘Megafloods’ Tilted The Very Direction of Earth’s Crust, Scientists Find

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Earth’s last major ice age locked up gargantuan amounts of water in vast glaciers. Once they melted, it was a spectacle to behold as tremendous floods gouged channels into the face of the planet.   The remnants of one of the largest of these ancient deluges are still visible in eastern Washington, in an area … Read more

The Sun Has Erupted Non-Stop All Month, And There Are More Giant Flares Coming

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The past few weeks or so have been a very busy time for the Sun. Our star has undergone a series of giant eruptions that have sent plasma hurtling through space. Perhaps the most dramatic was a powerful coronal mass ejection and solar flare that erupted from the far side of the Sun on February … Read more

The True Source of Earth’s Water Could Be Wildly Different to What You Think

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Nothing on Earth can live without water. The origin of water on Earth, therefore, is the origin of life in the Solar System (and the Universe) as we know it. Figuring out where and how our world obtained its water might be key to finding life on other worlds, but the truth is we don’t … Read more

Radical Idea Shows Laser Propulsion Could Rapidly Accelerate Trips to Mars

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NASA and China plan to mount crewed missions to Mars in the next decade. While this represents a tremendous leap in terms of space exploration, it also presents significant logistical and technological challenges.   For starters, missions can only launch for Mars every 26 months when our two planets are at the closest points in … Read more

The Iron of Earth’s Inner Core Could Be in a Strange ‘Superionic’ State, Study Finds

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Deep below the crust of Earth, past the thick mantle and liquid outer core, lies a 1,220-kilometer (760 mile) ball of solid inner core. But a new study has suggested that the inner core is not solid at all, instead forming a ‘superionic state’ with hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon, making it unlike either a liquid … Read more

The Thing About to Crash Into The Moon May Not Be a SpaceX Rocket After All

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A piece of space debris due to crash into the Moon in early March may not be a SpaceX rocket after all. According to an update posted by astronomer Bill Gray, who wrote the Project Pluto software used to track near-Earth objects, the object on a collision course is not a discarded SpaceX Falcon 9 … Read more

A Building Block of Life May Have Formed in Cosmic Dust Clouds Before Reaching Earth

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There are few bigger questions than how life first got started on Earth, but trying to put in the detective work almost 4 billion years after the event is understandably hard going for scientists. Now it looks as though we might have found another clue.   New research focuses specifically on peptides, smaller versions of … Read more

A New Simulation of Mars’s Core Could Explain How It Lost Its Magnetic Field

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Mars is a parched planet ruled by global dust storms. It’s also a frigid world, where night-time winter temperatures fall to minus 140 C (minus 220 F) at the poles. But it wasn’t always a dry, barren, freezing, inhospitable wasteland. It used to be a warm, wet, almost inviting place, where liquid water flowed across … Read more