Humanity is advancing rapidly towards a place where the news sounds an awful lot like science fiction. In fact, yesterday, Chinese scientists reported that they “teleported” a photon over hundreds of miles using a “quantum satellite.” But this isn’t Star Trek. It’s the real world.
Space is full of all sorts of garbage that can cause problems, including some of the stuff we send up there with good intentions. Take CubeSats. These nanosatellites, which weigh less than three pounds, were first sent into space in December 2006, and have become increasingly popular in the years since as a…
NOAA and NASA’s lovechild-slash-weather satellite, GOES-16, has been serving up some of the best images of Earth since it launched in November 2016. The satellite, which can take high quality images of Earth every 15 minutes, will be enormously helpful to meteorologists trying to predict extreme weather, which many…
Around 9:30pm last night, residents of Northern California began reporting bright lights in the sky that could be seen as far away as Las Vegas. So far no one has any idea what they were.
After a full month spinning out of control in space, Japan’s Space Agency has finally figured out how it lost control of Hitomi, a very expensive satellite that was hunting for black holes. This also means the agency will never get it back.
After an inexplicable shift into Emergency Mode, NASA managed to partially recover its planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft. But we still don’t know what caused it to wig out in the first place.
NASA’s Terris MODIS camera reveals how much black smoke is being pumped into the air because of the oil refinery fires in Libya. According to NASA, the fires were “started by attacks on oil terminals in Libya in very early January.” That’s a hell of a lot of smoke.
It may look like an artistic experiment in geometry that you could find on Etsy, but this is in fact a new satellite antenna developed by the European Space Agency.
European Space History has just posted this awesome movie poster-like orange-blue launch photo of a historic space event that took place on November 26th way back in 1965.
Sure, satellites can track storms and precipitation–but they can also measure snowfall on the ground.
Most of us have grown jaded to the lovely high-res video that drones deliver these days, which is so ubiquitous that it’s being used to recruit pledges to Greek life. Here’s something to restore your sense of wonder.
When you think ‘Sahara desert’ your mind’s eye probably conjures images of tawny, windswept dunes stretching monotonously into the horizon. But satellites have a way of giving us a strikingly different, often much more interesting view of our world.
Late last week, the European Space Agency lofted its Sentinel-2A satellite into orbit. Now, just four days later, it’s started beaming its first images back to Earth.
Ever contemplated going to war with America, but been thwarted when the Great Satan switched off your access to its navigation satellites? That’s potentially a real problem for China and Russia, but the real victor in this navigational arms race might be you; it’s improving the quality of location data on your phone…
Satellite images of our world are incredible on their own. But artist Federico Winer has taken aerial photography to a new level by portraying planet Earth as a mesmerizing kaleidoscope of geometric patterns and colors.
This natural-color image of sea ice off East Antarctica's Princess Astrid Coast was acquired April 5 by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite. Via NASA, here's a bit more about what's depicted in this striking photograph:
This beautiful satellite image shows one of the most saddening long-term natural disasters on Earth. The black patch in the upper left corner is the remaining body of the Aral Sea, located on the border between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan in Central Asia—which has lost around 90 percent of its water volume since 1960…
The National Snow and Ice Data Center has just released the results of its latest analysis of Arctic sea ice. Surprise—the prognosis is not good. The maximum extent of Arctic sea ice occurred early this year, and, at 5.61 million square miles, was the smallest in four decades.
You'd be forgiven for thinking that this was a piece of modern sculpture. But in fact you're looking one of NASA's old Vanguard satellites, photographed at Cape Canaveral, Florida in 1958.
This past Thursday, a blizzard warning was in effect on the Big Island of Hawaii. Yes, even on Hawaii, it snows.