SpaceX’s Starship will reach orbit this year on road to Mars, Elon Musk says

SpaceX will hit a big milestone this year on its road to Mars, if all goes according to plan. The company is developing a giant rocket known as Starship to help make Mars colonization and a variety of other ambitious exploration feats possible. Starship prototypes have taken just a handful of low-altitude hops off Earth’s … Read more

Astra fails to deliver satellites to orbit in 1st launch from Lower 48

Astra failed to deliver four satellites to orbit as planned today (Feb. 10) in the company’s first-ever orbital launch from the contiguous United States. The California startup’s 43-foot-tall (13 meters) Launch Vehicle 0008 (LV0008) launched the ELaNa 41 mission from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station today, rising off the pad at 3 p.m. EST … Read more

A New Planet Has Just Been Discovered Orbiting The Nearest Star to The Sun

What appears to be a teeny tiny alien world has just been found orbiting the Solar System’s closest stellar neighbor. The exoplanet candidate, named Proxima d, orbits a star named Proxima Centauri: a small, dim red dwarf star just 4.2 light-years from the Sun.   Amazingly, the exoplanet is just a quarter of the mass … Read more

China’s Tianwen 1 Mars mission marks 1st full year in orbit

It’s been a year since China’s first-ever independent interplanetary mission reached Mars, and in that time, Tianwen 1 has made major achievements while also delivering a number of surprises. The Tianwen 1 spacecraft entered orbit around the Red Planet on Feb. 10, 2021. Shortly after, the China National Space Administration released epic footage of the … Read more

Powerful Geomagnetic Storm Sends Dozens of SpaceX Satellites to a Fiery Doom

A powerful geomagnetic storm has doomed 40 Starlink satellites launched by SpaceX last week, the company has announced. Elon Musk‘s company launched a Falcon 9 rocket bearing the 49 satellites from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Thursday (Feb. 3), but a geomagnetic storm that struck a day later sent the satellites plummeting back toward Earth, … Read more

UAE’s Hope spacecraft marks 1 year in orbit around Mars

It’s been a full year since the United Arab Emirates made history when its first-ever interplanetary mission slipped into orbit around Mars. The Emirates Mars Mission, also called Hope, launched in July 2020, arrived at the Red Planet seven months later and successfully entered orbit around Mars on Feb. 9, 2021. After a few months … Read more

Asteroid sharing Earth’s orbit discovered — could it help future space missions?

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. David Rothery, Professor of Planetary Geosciences, The Open University Research has shown that the Earth trails an asteroid barely a kilometer across in its orbit about the sun — only the second such body to have ever been … Read more

NASA Just Announced Where ISS Will Plunge to Its Death in Early 2031

NASA says it plans to plunge the vestiges of the International Space Station (ISS) into a remote part of the Pacific Ocean known as Point Nemo in early 2031, after passing the baton to commercial space stations.   In an updated transition report just delivered to Congress, the space agency detailed the endgame for the space station, which … Read more

It’s Official! A New Trojan Asteroid Has Been Discovered Sharing Earth’s Orbit

Earth has officially been joined in its orbit around the Sun by a new trojan asteroid. Named 2020 XL5, this chunk of rock is only the second object of its type ever to have been conclusively identified. Its discovery suggests that perhaps Earth trojans may be more common than we knew, and offers new insights … Read more