Science

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Touchdown! NASA's Mars Perseverance Rover Safely Lands on Red Planet

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Members of NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover team watch in mission control as the first images arrive moments after the spacecraft successfully touched down on Mars, Thursday, Feb. 18, 2021, at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. A key objective for Perseverance’s mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planet’s geology and past climate, pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, and be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith.

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NASA Television to Air Departure of Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus from Space Statio

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Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus space freighter approaches the International Space Station where the Canadarm2 robotic arm is poised to capture it for docking.

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European Space Agency Signs Deal to Remove Debris from Orbit

The European Space Agency (ESA) has signed a $102 million contract with a Swiss start-up company to purchase a unique service: the first-ever removal of an item of space debris from orbit.

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A hint of new physics in polarized radiation from the early Universe

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Figure: As the light of the cosmic microwave background emitted 13.8 billion years ago (left image) travels through the Universe until observed on Earth (right image), the direction in which the electromagnetic wave oscillates (orange line) is rotated by an angle β. The rotation could be caused by dark matter or dark energy interacting with the light of the cosmic microwave background, which changes the patterns of polarization (black lines inside the images). The red and blue regions in the images show hot and cold regions of the cosmic microwave background, respectively.

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Catching a Radio Surprise

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An artist view of how a supernova can create an afterglow of radio light.

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Growing Interest in Moon Resources Could Cause Tension, Scientists Find

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NASA’s OSIRIS-REx Successfully Stows Sample of Asteroid Bennu

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The left image shows the OSIRIS-REx collector head hovering over the Sample Return Capsule (SRC) after the Touch-And-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism arm moved it into the proper position for capture. The right image shows the collector head secured onto the capture ring in the SRC. Both images were captured by the StowCam camera.

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Stars and Skulls: new ESO image reveals eerie nebula

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NEW SURVEY FINDS THAT SINGLE BURST OF STAR FORMATION CREATED MILKY WAY’S CENTRAL BULGE

Like most spiral galaxies, the Milky Way has a roughly spherical collection of stars at its center called the bulge. How the bulge formed has been a long-standing mystery, with many studies suggesting that it built up over time through multiple bursts of star formation. New research finds that the majority of stars in our galaxy’s central bulge formed in a single burst of star formation more than 10 billion years ago. To reach this conclusion, astronomers surveyed millions of stars across 200 square degrees of sky—an area equivalent to 1,000 full Moons. The resulting wealth of data is expected to fuel many more scientific inquiries.

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NASA’s OSIRIS-REx Spacecraft Collects Significant Amount of Asteroid

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Captured by the spacecraft’s SamCam camera on Oct. 22, 2020, this series of three images shows that the sampler head on NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is full of rocks and dust collected from the surface of the asteroid Bennu. They show also that some of these particles are slowly escaping the sampler head. Analysis by the OSIRIS-REx team suggests that bits of material are passing through small gaps where the head’s mylar flap is slightly wedged open. The mylar flap (the black bulge on the left inside the ring) is designed to keep the collected material locked inside, and these unsealed areas appear to be caused by larger rocks that didn’t fully pass through the flap. Based on available imagery, the team suspects there is plentiful sample inside the head, and is on a path to stow the sample as quickly as possible.