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A Russian cargo ship will launched toward the International Space Station early Thursday morning (May 30). The robotic Progress 88 freighter lifted off atop a Soyuz rocket from the Russia-run Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Thursday at 5:43 a.m. EDT (0943 GMT; 2:43 p.m. local time at Baikonur). Progress 88 is packed with about 3 […]

A Chinese commercial launch company sent four satellites into orbit on Wednesday (May 29) with the second sea launch of the Ceres-1 solid rocket. The Ceres-1 lifted off Wednesday at 4:12 a.m. EDT (0812 GMT; 4:12 p.m. Beijing time) from a sea platform off the coast of China’s eastern province of Shandong. Aboard were the

Newly emerged sunspot region AR3697 is already making its presence known, firing off another powerful X-class solar flare as it creeps around from behind the sun’s southeastern limb. The solar flare eruption peaked around 10:35 a.m. EDT (1435 GMT), causing shortwave radio blackouts across Western Europe and the Eastern United States. But this isn’t the first

The first Boeing Starliner astronauts are back at the launch site. NASA Crew Flight Test (CFT) astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams arrived at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Tuesday (May 28) ahead of their expected liftoff of Boeing Starliner on Saturday (June 1). NASA will hold a delta flight readiness review later

Scientists may have learned the history of the tiny contact-binary moon orbiting asteroid 152830 Dinkinesh, which was the first cosmic stop for  NASA’s Lucy spacecraft. That moonlet may have spun off its larger parent asteroid when Dinkinesh was sent twirling through space after absorbing and re-emitting sunlight. Having launched in 2021, the Lucy mission is

Using the Euclid space telescope, scientists have discovered a staggering 1.5 trillion orphan stars drifting through a massive cluster of thousands of galaxies, one of the largest structures in the cosmos. These orphan stars, ripped free from their own galaxies, are filling the space between the galaxies of the Perseus cluster with ghostly blue light.

An uncrewed Russian cargo spacecraft came crashing back to Earth today (May 28) as planned. The Progress 86 freighter undocked from the International Space Station (ISS) today at 4:39 a.m. EDT (0839 GMT) and headed back down to Earth. Progress 86 gave up the ghost a few hours later, burning up as planned over the

A new Earth-observation mission made it to space today (May 28). A Falcon 9 rocket from SpaceX lifted off with the Earth Cloud Aerosol and Radiation Explorer satellite, or EarthCARE for short,  from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California today at 6:20 p.m. EDT (2220 GMT or 3:20 p.m. local time in California). It was the

Two Chinese astronauts just set a new spacewalking record for the country. Ye Guangfu and Li Guangsu, two members of China’s three-person Shenzhou 18 mission, spent about 8.5 hours working outside the Tiangong space station today (May 28). That’s longer than any previous Chinese spacewalk, or extravehicular activity (EVA), according to the nation’s state-run Xinhua

Earth orbit is becoming increasingly polluted. NASA estimates that at least 500,000 pieces of debris 1 cm or greater circle our planet; ESA estimates more than 1 million. As the number of spacecraft we launch into orbit or beyond grows, so too does the amount of debris we leave in their wake. Uncontrolled debris is