Science

Illustration of NASA’s interior exploration using seismic, geodetic and heat transport surveys (InSight) Credit: NASA Dusty solar panels and darker skies should bring the[{” attribute=””>Mars lander mission to a close around the end of this year. Venus, and even rocky planets in other solar systems.” InSight landed on Mars on November 26, 2018. Equipped with …

Power levels drop for NASA’s earthquake-hunting InSight lander Read More »

Credit: Braslavets Denys/Shutterstock What do a modern combine harvester and a Diplodocus have in common? One answer, it seems, could be their large footprints on the ground. A new study by Swedish and Swiss researchers has found that the weight of agricultural machinery now approaches that of the largest animals to ever walk the Earth, …

Farm Vehicles Are Now Heavier Than Most Dinosaurs: Why That’s A Problem Read More »

Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft was lifted atop ULA’s Atlas 5 rocket on May 4 at the Cape Canaveral space station. Credit: United Launch Alliance Years behind schedule, Boeing’s Starliner crew capsule program is set to make a crucial unmanned test flight to the International Space Station slated for launch Thursday, a resumption of a mission abbreviated …

NASA and Boeing ready for long-delayed, high-stakes Starliner test flight – Spaceflight Now Read More »

UPDATE: SpaceX has set a new launch time for today’s Starlink satellite launch. The company now aims 06:59 a.m. EDT (10:59 a.m. GMT)a delay of 39 minutes. SpaceX plans to launch 53 more Starlink internet satellites and land the return rocket on a ship at sea early Wednesday morning (May 18), and you can watch …

Watch SpaceX launch 53 new Starlink satellites today Read More »

Transmission electron microscope image of a silicon-28 nanowire with a layer of silicon dioxide on the surface. Credit: Matthew R. Jones and Muhua Sun/Rice University Scientists have demonstrated a new material that conducts heat 150% more efficiently than conventional materials used in advanced chip technologies. The device, an ultrathin silicon nanowire, could enable smaller, faster …

New silicon nanowires can really handle the heat Read More »

It’s apparently “just a gap” – but we’re still going to care. open door Apparently this photo of a “gate” on the surface of Mars has been cropped such to make it look like something much cooler than it actually is. Over the weekend, a photo of NASA’s Curiosity rover went viral because it depicted …

Bad news! This ‘gateway’ to Mars doesn’t look like much when zoomed in Read More »

It’s apparently “just a gap” – but we’re still going to care. open door Apparently this photo of a “gate” on the surface of Mars has been cropped such to make it look like something much cooler than it actually is. Over the weekend, a photo of NASA’s Curiosity rover went viral because it depicted …

Bad news! This ‘gateway’ to Mars doesn’t look like much when zoomed in Read More »

Illustration of cloud-like ionized plasma in the tokamak of the ITER fusion reactor. Credit: ITER EPFL physicists, within a broad European collaboration, have revised one of the fundamental laws that was the basis of[{” attribute=””>plasma and fusion research for over three decades, even governing the design of megaprojects like ITER. The update demonstrates that we …

A new fundamental law releases fusion energy Read More »

Days after a pair of Falcon 9 rockets launched 106 Starlink satellites in less than 23 hours, SpaceX has already lifted another Falcon 9 rocket vertically for another Starlink mission – expected to be the fourth this month. This mission – Starlink 4-18 – will see SpaceX launch another batch of 53 Starlink satellites into …

SpaceX is already raising the Falcon 9 rocket vertically for the next Starlink launch Read More »