News
NASA's next major space telescope, the Nancy Grace Roman, is expected to find roughly 100, 000 new transiting planets in just five years " along with the largest catalogue ever assembled of rogue worlds drifting through the galaxy without a star to orbit
6+ hour, 21+ min ago (565+ words) ...
When NASA deliberately crashed Apollo hardware into the Moon, the seismometers left behind recorded vibrations for nearly an hour " as if the Moon itself were ringing like a bell
9+ hour, 13+ min ago (0+ words) ...
Two radio astronomers spent months trying to eliminate a faint hiss in their antenna, even scrubbing out pigeon droppings, before realising the noise they couldn't get rid of was the afterglow of the early universe " the cosmic microwave background left behind by the Big Bang.
2+ day, 23+ hour ago (539+ words) In 1964 and 1965, two radio astronomers at Bell Telephone Laboratories spent roughly a year trying to track down a faint, persistent noise in their antenna. Published May 26, 2026 The one thing worth adjusting is the emphasis. The pigeons make a good anecdote,…...
The Opportunity rover's famous last words " "my battery is low and it's getting dark" " were never actually sent from Mars. The real story of where that sentence came from is stranger, and somehow sadder
3+ day, 11+ hour ago (464+ words) ...
The Hubble Space Telescope was launched before Google, before the smartphone era, and before digital cameras became normal, and NASA engineers have now reconfigured it to keep observing the universe on a single working gyroscope after 35 years aloft.
1+ week, 10+ hour ago (311+ words) The Hubble Space Telescope returned to science operations on 14 June 2024 in a new pointing configuration that uses one of its three remaining gyroscopes instead of three. Published May 22, 2026 This is not a last-gyro situation. It is a deliberate down-shift to…...
For the first time in human history, most people live under skies they cannot see " and the psychological consequence of having lost the night sky has barely begun to be measured.
1+ week, 4+ day ago (168+ words) ...
The Hubble Space Telescope was nearly blind for its first three years because its primary mirror was ground too flat by 2. 2 micrometers, and NASA's reputation depended on a 1993 repair mission built around corrective optics the size of a refrigerator
1+ week, 5+ day ago (752+ words) The Hubble Space Telescope went into orbit in April 1990 with a primary mirror polished to the wrong shape by 2. 2 micrometers, a figure smaller than a fiftieth of a human hair and yet large enough to make a $1. 5 billion" By Space…...
A hidden layer of microbial life has been found beneath the Atacama Desert, and it may be the closest Earth can get to rehearsing the search for life on Mars
1+ week, 5+ day ago (1242+ words) By Space Daily Editorial Team " Editorial process Published May 17, 2026 The Atacama Desert has long been useful to planetary scientists for a simple reason: it is not Mars, but it fails in some of the same ways Mars fails. It is…...
The complete story of how the James Webb Space Telescope survived twenty-five years of near-cancellation to become the most ambitious instrument humans have ever launched
2+ week, 6+ day ago (213+ words) From its 1996 origins as the Next Generation Space Telescope through three near-cancellations and a $10 billion development arc, the James Webb Space Telescope's survival is as remarkable as its science. Now a new 20 percent budget cut threatens the most productive infrared…...
Inside the Deep Space Network: How three antenna complexes on three continents carry every whisper from every spacecraft humanity has ever sent beyond Earth
1+ mon, 3+ day ago (1352+ words) Space Daily Inside the Deep Space Network: How three antenna complexes on three continents carry every whisper from every spacecraft humanity has ever sent beyond Earth The most powerful listening devices humanity has ever built are not pointed at our…...