Space

Rocket Lab quietly launched a small satellite from New Zealand on Friday in a high-flying military exercise to test the US Space Force’s ability to rapidly respond to a crisis in low-Earth orbit — and in doing so shattered the record for the fastest responsive space mission ever flown. The launch was scarcely announced in […]

White House aims to unify and accelerate US quantum space infrastructure amid growing competition with China WASHINGTON, D.C. — The White House has issued an executive order aiming to unify and accelerate U.S. development of quantum technologies, including space systems that could enable next-generation navigation, sensing, and secure communications. President Donald Trump signed the order […]

GOLDEN, Colorado — Scientists are laying the scientific and technical groundwork for one of humanity’s most audacious goals: transforming Mars from a frozen desert into a world where life can thrive. And they are starting small — with less than 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds) of artificial particles released into the Martian sky. Researchers gathered here […]

SpaceX has achieved a milestone that underscores just how thoroughly the company has reshaped the space industry: as of June 12, 2026, it has launched more satellites than every other organization on Earth combined since the dawn of the Space Age in 1957. The tally, compiled by investor and former space-industry executive Christian Keil, puts […]

For more than a decade, a faint spherical glow of gamma rays emanating from the heart of the Milky Way has divided astrophysicists. Known as the Galactic Center Excess (GCE), this high-energy signal has been interpreted as either the long-sought fingerprint of dark matter annihilation or the combined light of tens of thousands of rapidly […]

Featured image: [Artist’s concept of the Sun as a red giant, with Earth in the foreground; credit: ESA/Hubble (M. Kornmesser)] For decades, the standard answer to the question of Earth’s ultimate fate has been grim: in roughly 5 billion years, the Sun will swell into a red giant, engulf the inner planets, and incinerate whatever […]

Featured image: [Artist’s concept of dark matter particles decaying in a galaxy halo; credit: ESA/Hubble, NASA, J. Mould] One of the deepest assumptions in modern cosmology is that dark matter is stable. It has been there since the early universe, and it will be there, unchanged, for the foreseeable future. But what if that assumption […]

A tiny spacecraft built by two dozen undergraduate students at Tsinghua University is set to join the most heavily observed asteroid encounter in history: the April 2029 flyby of Apophis, a 340-meter near-Earth asteroid that will pass within 32,000 kilometers of Earth, closer than the ring of geostationary satellites. The Student-led Threatening Asteroid Reconnaissance of […]

Astronomers have found the first hints that supermassive black holes may be surrounded by dense clouds of dark matter, using a novel technique that repurposes a standard method of weighing black holes: listening for light echoes. The research, led by Mayank Sharma, a physics graduate student at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech), […]

A new mission concept could give astronomers the tool they have dreamed of for decades: a space-based observatory capable of directly detecting signs of life on rocky exoplanets. But rather than a single giant telescope, the design calls for a swarm of smaller spacecraft flying in precise formation hundreds of meters apart. The Large Interferometer […]