U.S.-based aerospace manufacturer Rocket Lab completed its first successful commercial launch on Saturday, sending seven spacecraft including “six tiny satellites and a drag sail demonstrator” into orbit aboard a relatively small Electron rocket designed primarily for smallsats and cubesats, Spaceflight Now reported.
Honestly? It’s okay to want to be alone.
SpaceX’s Starman and cherry red Tesla Roadster have traveled beyond Mars. SpaceX shared a diagram of the car once driven by the aerospace manufacturer’s CEO Elon Musk indicating it has now reached beyond the Red Planet.
More than two years after its launch, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has beamed back what the space agency is calling a “super-resolution” view of the asteroid Bennu. OSIRIS-REx is NASA’s exciting mission to near-Earth asteroid 101955 Bennu, which the spacecraft is set to reach in about a month, to collect and bring…
NASA’s venerable Kepler space telescope, which discovered nearly 2,700 exoplanets in distant star systems, has officially been retired after finally running out of fuel, the space agency wrote in a statement on Tuesday. When it launched in 2009, it was equipped with “the largest digital camera outfitted for outer…
The craft that would have been the first private Chinese rocket to deliver a satellite into orbit around the Earth failed on Saturday, the Guardian reported, with something going wrong with the Landspace Zhuque-1's third-stage deployment.
This week, the European Space Agency released a curious photo captured by the Mars Express orbiter of a 930-mile-long cloud formation spilling out of the massive, 12-mile-high Arsia Mons volcano on Mars—a phenomenon that has been observed for weeks straight. It certainly gave every superficial appearance that the…
It’s been a big week for the service journalism here at Gizmodo dot com. We published an exhaustive guide to the 100 websites that shaped the internet as we know it, for better or worse (not you, NASA), regardless of whether this internet thing was all a terrible mistake. We explored how archivists could save history…
The tech and science world has had a very interesting week: Researchers have discovered what happens when you give our favorite tentacled, ocean-dwelling friends MDMA, landed rovers on asteroids, confirmed the oldest known animal fossil on the planet, and found something very weird going on with a distant neutron star…
Two landers from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) have successfully touched down on the Ryugu asteroid after separating from the Hayabusa2 probe in orbit, and have begun transmitting images from the space rock’s surface.
The European Union passed its disastrous Copyright Directive this week, including amended versions of its onerous Articles 11 and 13 (the so-called “link tax” and “upload filter,” respectively). There’s still time to make sure it never passes into law by defeating a final ratification vote in January, though given the …
California Governor Jerry Brown announced on Friday at the Global Climate Action Summit that the state would be launching its “own damn satellite” amid concern that Donald Trump’s administration is minimizing NASA’s role in climate research, Politico reported.
NASA’s last Delta II rocket blasted into the atmosphere from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on Saturday carrying the Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2), Space.com reported, in the rocket’s 155th and final mission.
Researchers with the University of California, Berkeley’s SETI Research Center Breakthrough Listen team have deployed new neural net technology to help analyze the reams of data they’ve collection—and they quickly discovered a set of mysterious, as-of-yet unexplained fast radio bursts from a distant galaxy, per…
We’re up for a big week in the news, folks. There’s a lot going to happen, from Apple’s big September 12th announcement event to the notably less fun Hurricane Florence, which is currently projected to barrel into the East Coast at a minimum Category 3 status or possibly even worse before the weekend. As the president…
Sitting atop Saturn’s north pole is one of the Solar System’s most striking weather patterns: a rotating, color-changing hexagon slightly wider than Earth. A new study shows there’s another hexagon directly on top of the first one—and that’s weird.
Accomplished astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell has won a $3 million Special Breakthrough Prize for her discovery of pulsars 50 years ago and continued leadership in science.
Jupiter is strange for a number of reasons. It’s the biggest planet in our Solar System, of course. It harbors perhaps the most intense radiation environments. And, according to a new study, it has a magnetic field unlike that of any other known planet.
Sometimes, things line up just perfectly. For example, back in 2017, the Hubble Space Telescope got a full view of Saturn’s northern aurora. The newly-released image above isn’t exactly what Hubble saw—but it’s still exciting, I promise.
