NASA is set to fly where no one has flown before – Mars’ atmosphere. The American space agency is gearing up to launch its Perseverance rover along with a terrestrial helicopter this summer that will soar through the layers of gas that hang over the Red Planet. Named Ingenuity, the copter will fly at an … Read more
NASA proposes 2025 mission to Neptune’s mysterious moon Triton which orbits in the OPPOSITE direction to the planet’s rotation and may host an ocean of liquid water beneath its icy crust The only craft to study Triton up close to date was Voyager 2 back in 1989 Much of the moon’s surface is unmapped and … Read more
Pluto harbours a vast ocean beneath its frozen crust that has been there for 4.5 billion years – 500 million years longer than Earth’s seas – a study has found. Pluto is known today as a ball of frozen ice and rock orbiting the sun at a distance of 3.7 billion miles. But a new … Read more
Virgin Galactic has signed a new deal with NASA that will see the Richard Branson owned firm prepare future commercial astronauts for flights to the ISS. Under the agreement, Virgin Galactic will develop a new private orbital astronaut training program and look out for potential space tourist candidates. This is a new initiative for the … Read more
Amazing images of the Butterfly and the Jewel Bug nebulae have been captured in unprecedented detail by the Hubble Space Telescope, according to NASA. These colourful regions of interstellar space are created thanks to ‘stars gone haywire’, throwing off jets and bubbles of hot gas at the end of their life. The new images show … Read more
NASAs Mars 2020 mission is expected to go ahead as planned next month despite coronavirus setbacks that could have led to a two year delay. The rover mission is scheduled to launch on July 20 at 14:15 BST from Cape Canaveral in Florida and will land on the Red Planet in February 2021. The rover’s … Read more
The Kepler mission has spotted thousands of exoplanets since 2014, with 30 planets less than twice the size of Earth now known to orbit within the habitable zones of their stars. Launched from Cape Canaveral on March 7th 2009, the Kepler telescope has helped in the search for planets outside of the solar system. It … Read more
NASA is preparing to send a unisex toilet to the International Space Station (ISS) that better accommodates female astronauts. A recurring problem with microgravity toilets is they’d been designed predominantly with men in mind, due to the historically higher proportion of male astronauts. The new toilet, called the ‘universal waste management system’ (UWMS), is designed to … Read more
European Space Agency enlists Airbus to help it build a Mars rover called ‘Fetch’ that will find and retrieve rock samples on the Red Planet The Airbus firm has won the next phase of the contract to develop the rover It will travel more than 9 miles across the red planet to pick up rock … Read more
A galaxy far, far away! NASA’s New Horizons travels 4.3 billion miles to perform the first interstellar ‘parallax’ experiment that shows stars are positioned differently in space than when viewed from Earth NASA’s New Horizons performed the first interstellar ‘parallax’ experiment It snapped images 4.3 billion miles from Earth of Proxima Centauri and Wolf 359 Due … Read more