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100 stories from Planck Standard. Latest: September 24, 2026.
ETH Zurich isotope measurements on half a gram of NASA's OSIRIS-REx sample overturn the idea that Bennu formed late and far out, and suggest it holds the original recipe for rocky planets.
The August 31 burn was more than 99 percent accurate. Goddard's center director credited 'exquisite planning by our orbital dynamics team, brilliant execution by the operations team, and a precise launch from SpaceX.' A second burn later this month is expected to add four more years.
An Intuitive Machines image specialist spotted the fresh scar on Oct. 24, 2025, and 'dropped everything.' The blast churned the surface over 66 miles and left a 4-mile cold spot. The IAU has named it McGetchin.
The IC 348 panorama shows newborn stars firing jets into the surrounding gas, two protostars with nearly parallel outflows, and a planet-mass object that appears to have its own disk. The lightest brown dwarfs also carry an unidentified hydrocarbon in their atmospheres.
Working from OSIRIS-REx samples, researchers measured the asteroid's surface strength at under one pascal and built a framework linking that strength to the size and shape of individual grains.
A $30 million rescue spacecraft went into an uncontrollable spin weeks after launch and never recovered its pointing. After 22 years of catching gamma-ray bursts, Swift is falling about five miles a month.
Lowell reached Category 5 south of Hawaii, Karina held Category 4 to its east, and Marie churned off Baja California. The Atlantic has not produced a single hurricane this season.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope lifted off on a Falcon Heavy at 7:26 a.m. on August 30. Its 300-megapixel infrared camera surveys the sky about 1,000 times faster than Hubble.
The planet's north pole has worn a hexagon for four decades. The new southern decagon is still strengthening — and two amateur astronomers saw the first hints of it.
WatchThe executive order, signed at Johnson Space Center, would build a fourth service academy for the Space Force, NASA and the commercial launch industry. Ted Cruz is already lobbying to put it in Texas.
A WB-57 jet at 50,000 feet will run down the Moon's shadow with four cameras shooting 20 frames a second, while roughly 86 balloons go up over Iceland and Spain.
NASA's IXPE telescope stared at the magnetar 1E 1547.0-5408 and found X-ray polarization nearly three times higher than any comparable source. The leading explanation is vacuum birefringence: the vacuum itself behaving like a lens.
WatchThe discarded Falcon 9 upper stage that launched two private lunar landers in January 2025 drifted for eighteen months and hit near Einstein Crater at 6:35 UTC Wednesday. Nobody photographed the collision, but the Very Large Telescope read its chemical signature.
Ice-rich lunar soil carries seismic waves two to three times faster than dry soil, a University of Maryland-led team reports. China's Chang'e-7 lands a seismometer near Shackleton Crater later this year, and it can test the idea.
The polygonal fractures in Valle Grande measure two to three inches across and climb a 20-foot butte. Scientists have three competing explanations and no answer yet.
The spacecraft skimmed 2,864 miles above Mars on May 15 to steal speed for its trip to a metal asteroid. The flyby doubled as a full dress rehearsal — and produced a timelapse of the Red Planet.
Individual readings from the rover's Mössbauer spectrometer were too noisy to show it. Combined into one composite spectrum, they revealed crystalline hematite sitting in ordinary Martian soil.
Artemis III has been rewritten as a dress rehearsal: three rockets launching in quick succession in 2027, two prototype landers, and a crew that stays in Earth orbit the whole time.
From compact power for the Moon's shadowed craters to systems for servicing spacecraft in orbit, the agency is pairing its labs and expertise with private industry in a $60 million-plus collaboration.
The vivid color comes from a summer explosion of chalk-armored plankton so vast it can be seen from space — captured in stunning detail by NASA's new PACE mission.
Astrobotic, Firefly Aerospace and Intuitive Machines will fly four robotic missions in late 2028, each carrying the same trio of instruments to scout dust, radiation and navigation for a permanent human outpost.
The newly identified world, Beta Pictoris d, makes the young nearby system only the second ever found to host at least three directly imaged planets.
The car-sized rover crossed the 42.195-kilometer mark on its 1,890th Martian day while exploring ancient terrain west of Jezero Crater, shattering the pace set by its predecessor Opportunity.
An underwater eruption near Papua New Guinea has been spewing steam and staining the ocean since May, and scientists are waiting to see whether a new island will be born.
Refined simulations from a NASA science center suggest the Sun's own magnetic dynamo is what keeps the mysterious tachocline confined to a knife-edge, a key to forecasting solar storms.
A new proposal argues that rock and soil returned from Mars and beyond should be screened at a robotic facility on the Moon first — casting the lunar surface as humanity's first line of biological defense.
To celebrate the James Webb Space Telescope's fourth science anniversary, NASA unveiled a new view of Centaurus A, peering through the dust that had long hidden the galaxy's violent heart.
In 65 hours of infrared observations, NASA's James Webb Space Telescope resolved the frenetic starburst galaxy Messier 82 in unprecedented detail, exposing a warped disk and millions of individual suns.
NASA released a red, white and blue portrait of the 13-billion-year-old globular cluster NGC 6426, whose ancient stars hold clues to how the universe first forged the ingredients for planets and life.
The rare 'super-puff' worlds TOI-791 b and c are roughly Jupiter's size but a tiny fraction of its mass, ranking among the lowest-density planets ever detected.
The U.S.-French SWOT satellite mapped the Pacific tsunami unleashed by a magnitude 8.8 Kamchatka earthquake, revealing waves far more scattered and complex than the textbook picture of a single, stable surge.
An upgraded quantum facility aboard the International Space Station is chilling atoms to near absolute zero, exploiting weightlessness to build matter waves impossible to make on Earth.
Close-up data from the Donaldjohanson flyby reveal a 155-million-year-old relic that tumbles like a spinning top and bears chemical traces of water.
Spectra from a glowing red object called GLIMPSE-17775 reveal a supermassive black hole wrapped in a dense cocoon of gas just 1.8 billion years after the Big Bang.
A single Air Force-developed propellant ran both a chemical engine and electric electrospray thrusters in the lab — a dual-mode design that could send briefcase-sized CubeSats to Mars.
Electrons accelerated in the turbulent region ahead of Jupiter's bow shock offer the first direct evidence that the same process powering them also forges cosmic rays across the galaxy.
Set to launch this fall, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will use gravitational microlensing to find planets, rogue worlds, black holes and neutron stars across the Milky Way's crowded core.
Four astronauts will test unprecedented docking operations with Blue Origin and SpaceX landers in Earth orbit, paving the way for 2028 Moon landing.
The breakthrough technology could give small satellites unprecedented flexibility in space missions, combining rapid acceleration with highly efficient long-range travel.
Revolutionary propulsion system combines chemical and electric thrusters using single fuel, potentially transforming small satellite capabilities with NASA-supported mission testing technology in orbit.
Veteran spacefarers Randy Bresnik, Luca Parmitano, Frank Rubio and rookie Andre Douglas will fly the mission, targeted for as soon as late 2027, that aims to land humans near the lunar south pole.
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has directly detected methane gas streaming from 3I/ATLAS, revealing that the rare interstellar comet formed in a chemical environment unlike anything in our solar system.
The Polylingual Experimental Terminal beamed data through NASA, Viasat and SES networks from orbit — a milestone that could let future missions hop between commercial and government relays instead of relying on one.
Work on Russia's leaky module creates worrying turn in ongoing space station maintenance crisis.
NASA scientists traced the unprecedented Type IV burst to a vast magnetic 'helmet streamer' fed by three coronal mass ejections — a marathon outburst that could sharpen forecasts for the space weather that threatens satellites.
Conflicting measurements from NASA's Cassini mission made Saturn appear to change its rotation rate — something thought impossible. A new study finds the culprit is a self-sustaining 'planetary heat pump' driven by the giant's aurora.
The experimental jet, built to replace the sonic boom with a soft 'thump,' is set to go supersonic in early June, a milestone that could one day return high-speed passenger flight to the skies over land.
Astronomers used the James Webb Space Telescope to show that Saturn's apparently shifting rotation rate was an illusion created by powerful high-altitude winds — and that the planet's auroras run a self-sustaining heat engine.
The mission will explore largely uncharted regions of the Milky Way, potentially revealing more alien worlds than all previous missions combined.
Nearly two decades of NASA data revealed that a rapidly spinning magnetar powered superluminous supernova SN 2017egm, helping settle a long debate over what drives the universe's brightest stellar explosions.
A new study published in The Cryosphere documents a two-month interval during which Hektoria's grounded ice line retreated more than five miles — a melt rate unprecedented since satellite tracking of polar ice began.
Accelerated timeline brings infrared observatory ahead of original May 2027 deadline to explore dark energy, dark matter, and exoplanets.
A routine drill into a sandstone slab nicknamed 'Atacama' lifted the entire chunk out of Gale Crater and stuck it to the rover's drill sleeve — an annoying first that handed scientists their first ever look at pristine, unweathered Martian bedrock from below.
A new Nature Geoscience paper combines 22 years of TIMED and SABER satellite data with refined radiative-transfer models to show how the upper atmosphere has shrunk visibly as carbon dioxide climbs.
The magnetoplasmadynamic engine ran 25 times more powerful than the thrusters now flying on the Psyche mission, hitting tungsten temperatures above 5,000°F and marking the highest-power electric propulsion test ever conducted in the United States.
Sifting through millions of meteor sightings, researcher Patrick Shober identified 282 fireballs that share an extreme orbit — evidence of a hidden Sun-grazing asteroid disintegrating in the inner solar system, with implications for planetary defense.
A new Astronomy & Astrophysics study finds that the soon-to-launch Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will be sensitive enough to weigh isolated neutron stars through gravitational microlensing, finally cataloguing the city-sized stellar corpses that have eluded detection for nearly a century.
JPL says its High-Performance Spaceflight Computing processor, built jointly with Microchip Technology, has cleared early radiation testing well beyond its 100x design target and is on track to fly on Artemis lunar missions and Mars Sample Return.
The 400-billion-mile planet-forming disk around the young star IRAS 23077+6707, 1,000 light-years from Earth, is roughly 40 times wider than our solar system and unexpectedly turbulent.
The probe will skim just 2,800 miles above Mars on Friday to gain gravitational boost while testing instruments and capturing rare crescent views of the Red Planet.
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