Space Exploration, features and articles | Educational Science

Sep 8, 2023

In a 1st, NASA's Perseverance rover makes breathable oxygen on Mars

In a first-of-its-kind experiment, NASA's Perseverance rover has produced enough oxygen on Mars to keep an astronaut alive for three hours. The rover, which first touched down on Mars in February 2021, produced the element using its Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE) device — which generated the oxygen...

Sep 10, 2023

Space photo of the week: Gargantuan sunspots photobomb the world's largest telescope

What it is: The Extremely Large Telescope, which will be the world's largest telescope when it begins operations in 2028 When it was taken: Aug. 28, 2023, and published Sept. 4, 2023 Where it is: At the peak of Cerro Armazones, at an altitude of 9,850 feet (3,000 meters), in...

Sep 11, 2023

See a European satellite take a fiery fall through the atmosphere in world-1st mission

The European Space Agency has revealed final images of a trailblazing, wind-profiling spacecraft ahead of its fiery descent into the atmosphere. On Sept. 5, the European Space Agency (ESA) released an animation constructed from the final eight images captured of its wind-measuring Aeolus spacecraft. The combined radar images show how...

Sep 12, 2023

New poppy seed-sized fuel pellets could power nuclear reactors on the moon

Scientists in the U.K. have created mini, seed-sized nuclear fuel cells that could power futuristic flower-shaped reactors on the moon as soon as 2030. The tiny new fuel cells, developed by researchers at the Nuclear Futures Institute at Bangor University in Wales, are roughly the size of poppy seeds, which...

Sep 21, 2023

Oops! US Space Force may have accidentally punched a hole in the upper atmosphere

A rocket carrying a U.S. Space Force satellite into orbit may have punched a hole in Earth's upper atmosphere, after lifting off with just 27 hours' notice — a new record for the shortest amount of time from getting the go-ahead to actually launching. Firefly Aerospace, a company contracted by...

Sep 24, 2023

NASA's OSIRIS-REx capsule returns to Earth with a sample from the 'potentially hazardous' asteroid Bennu

NASA's OSIRIS-Rex asteroid-sampling mission, tasked with finding hints about the origins of life on our planet, has returned to Earth from a seven-year journey to the other side of the solar system. The billion-dollar spacecraft fired its descent capsule from a height of roughly 63,000 miles (102,000 kilometers) above Earth...

Sep 25, 2023

India's Chandrayaan-3 moon lander fails to answer wake-up call, may be dead for good

Engineers at the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) have begun attempts to wake the Chandrayaan-3 lunar lander and rover from hibernation after the two-week frosty lunar night. On Friday (Sept. 22), ISRO said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, that it has made attempts to establish communication...

Sep 28, 2023

Record-breaking astronaut Frank Rubio finally returns to Earth after accidentally spending 371 days in space

Dr. Frank Rubio, the first American astronaut to live in space continuously for more than a year, has returned to Earth. He spent 371 consecutive days on the International Space Station (ISS), eclipsing the nearly yearlong stints of astronauts Mark Vande Hei (355 days) and Scott Kelly (340 days). The...

Oct 2, 2023

Watch Chinese astronauts light a spherical fire in risky open-flame experiment on Tiangong space station

China's Shenzhou 16 astronauts conducted an eye-raising experiment in space involving open flames aboard the Tiangong space station. Astronauts Gui Haichao and Zhu Yangzhu lit a candle during a live lecture broadcast from China's Tiangong space station on Sept. 21 to demonstrate how flames burn in microgravity. Strikingly, the flames...

Oct 5, 2023

US government issues 1st-ever space junk fine, charging satellite TV company whopping $150k

The United States government has handed out its first-ever fine to a private company that left space junk in orbit. The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issued a $150,000 fine to satellite television provider DISH for not safely deorbiting its EchoStar-7 satellite. The satellite was launched in 2002, and DISH...

Oct 9, 2023

New Chinese space telescope will 'outdo Hubble', researchers claim

China is readying a major project that not only augments the nation's astronomical research agenda but bolsters the use of the country's space station complex. And there are bragging rights associated with China's star-studded venture. The spacecraft is called Xuntian, known as the Chinese Survey Space Telescope or the Chinese...

Oct 11, 2023

Psyche: Everything you need to know about NASA's mission to a huge metallic asteroid

On Friday (Oct. 13) NASA's Psyche spacecraft blasted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. In 2029, after traveling 2.2 billion miles (3.5 billion kilometers), the spacecraft will arrive at the far side of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, where the asteroid...

Oct 12, 2023

Ammonia leak on Russian section of International Space Station 'has now ceased,' but astronauts remain cautious

On Wednesday (Oct. 11), a coolant leak on a Russian module of the International Space Station (ISS) appears to have stopped two days after being discovered, NASA wrote in a blog post. Space station astronauts were never in any danger due to the ammonia leak that began on Monday (Oct....

Oct 13, 2023

Gaia spacecraft reveals 'goldmine' of over 500,000 undiscovered stars

The Gaia mission has revealed a goldmine of new information on cosmic objects as it continues to create the most comprehensive stellar catalog ever compiled. The new release, known as Gaia's focused product release (FPR), contains over half a million new faint stars, more than 380 new gravitationally lensed quasars...

Oct 24, 2023

Falling metal space junk is changing Earth's upper atmosphere in ways we don't fully understand

The sky is littered with metal pollution from bits of space junk that burn up as they reenter the atmosphere, a new study reveals. This unexpected level of contamination, which will likely rise sharply in the coming decades, could change our planet's atmosphere in ways we still don't fully understand,...