Recently, my colleagues at Deadspin posted a ranking of the planets. But it was mostly incorrect. After extensively researching and writing about our solar neighborhood, I feel I’m fairly qualified to take a stab at ranking these bad boys once and for all.
Right now, NASA’s Origins Spectral Interpretation Resource Identification Security - Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) spacecraft is hurtling through the void in order to link up with an asteroid named Bennu in 2018. While the intrepid spacecraft still has a way to go until its big rendezvous, today it’ll casually fly by…
Not to scare you, but you’re getting hit with radiation constantly. First, there’s just regular old light (yep, that’s a kind of radiation). Then there are low levels of higher energy radiation like the kind in nuclear reactors, including particles coming out of the soil and off of bananas. But the highest-energy…
Earlier this month, President Donald Trump nominated Jim Bridenstine—a Republican representative in Oklahoma—as NASA’s new leader. Like most people in this administration, Bridenstine actively supports ideas antithetical to his (soon-to-be) agency: he’s an avid supporter of private space companies and denies that…
Before Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and other space enthusiasts can ship humans to Mars as easily as an Amazon Prime delivery, we need to figure out they’ll fare on a foreign planet. Luckily, NASA and the University of Hawaii have been all over this, funding several successful iterations of an experiment called Hawaii Space…
For those who’ve followed NASA’s Cassini mission these past 20 years, it’s still a bit hard to believe it’s gone. On Friday, September 15th, the spacecraft plunged itself into Saturn’s atmosphere, becoming part of the planet it had studied tirelessly for 13 years. While Cassini’s mission is over, there’s plenty of…
Holy shit, stop, please stop. When a crazy person says something crazy in real life, we ignore them. But for some reason on the internet we decide that every crazy person is worth listening to, news outlets with large audiences write about their fever dreams, and less crazy people suddenly get concerned because now…
After a 20 year sojourn in the final frontier, at approximately 5:00 AM PT this morning, NASA’s Jet Propulsion laboratory lost contact with the Cassini spacecraft, which had plunged into Saturn’s atmosphere about an hour and a half prior, ending its 13-year exploration of the Saturn system.
What kid hasn’t imagined finding a secret door that leads to an adventure-filled multiverse? In Vault Comics’ Maxwell’s Demons, the titular hero is smart enough to actually build the tools to really go on those adventures. But the cosmos is a big place, filled with joy and horror in equal measure—as poor Max finds out.
Over a thousand light years away, there’s a planet that isn’t conforming to your so-called rules. It’s not one of the jocks like Earth, or one of the preps like Saturn. WASP-12b probably sits beneath the bleachers dressed in its black outfit with the checkered wristbands it bought from Hot Jupiter Topic, listening to…
Space has a funny way of making us feel both incredibly small yet infinitely lucky for being part of such a vast cosmic sorority. Of course, humans have barely scratched the surface of the final frontier—we’ve never even sent people beyond the Moon. While many uncrewed spacecraft have done an incredible job of…
By all accounts, the exoplanet known as WASP-19b is a pretty inhospitable place. As one of the closest known hot-Jupiters to its star—orbiting just two percent of the distance between the Earth and the Sun—it’s home to a scorchingly hot, violent atmosphere. The side of the planet which always faces the star churns…
To learn more about why some germs seem harder to kill in near-weightless conditions, scientists aboard the ISS recently doused a batch of bacteria with antibiotics—an experiment which resulted in a series of startling physical changes that may be helping the bacteria to survive and thrive in space.
Something just popped into one NASA telescope’s view, and it isn’t a star or a meteor—it’s one of our spacecraft. It’s hurtling towards planet Earth right now.
The end is nigh for NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, the intrepid probe that’s been studying the Saturn system for the last 13 years. On Friday, September 15th, Cassini will plunge itself into Saturn’s atmosphere with its antenna pointed toward Earth, becoming part of the place it’s called home all these years.
Though Cassini only has a few days left to study Saturn before it dies, it’s seriously making them count. Today, NASA released what it says are “the highest-resolution color images of any part of Saturn’s rings.” In true Cassini fashion, they’re absolutely mesmerizing.
We all know space is goth. Pluto, however, is the obvious metal baby of the solar system, shrouded in darkness at a distance of up to 4.67 billion miles (7.5 billion kilometers) from Earth. It’s only fitting that everyone’s favorite dwarf planet—named after the Roman god of the underworld—gets some seriously metal…
If you’ve managed to hang onto your solar eclipse glasses since August 21st, don’t throw them away! If you haven’t already donated your shades to Astronomers Without Borders, you can use them to stare at the Sun and actually learn something cool.
SpaceX has pulled off some exhilarating launches and landings in the past, but today’s mission ranks among its most suspenseful. Today, sometime between right now and about 3pm ET, the company will send a Falcon 9 rocket carrying a US Air Force X-37B space plane from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, just…
Everyone from David Bowie to astrobiologists to tinfoil hat believers has pondered the question: is there life on Mars? While we’ve found direct evidence of liquid water on the Red Planet, we have yet to find any microbes there. But not all hope is lost—new discoveries from NASA’s Curiosity rover have brought forth…
