Category Astronomy/Space

In Mars’ northern hemisphere, springtime has arrived, and observations from the HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Experiment) onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has captured partially defrosted dunes on the western slope of dunes inside Kaiser Crater.

In the winter, the dark sand dunes are covered in a blanket of white seasonal ice, which you can see in the image below. But this image actually shows the beginning of Martian springtime, where the sunny side of the dunes had just begun to thaw. The lead image shows even further thawing, with the darker dunes showing through.

“Bright patches of frost (white in enhanced color) are clearly visible and are made up of water and carbon dioxide ices,” w...

NASA’s massive new rocket is poised to make its first journey to a launchpad on Thursday ahead of a battery of tests that will clear it to blast off to the Moon this summer.

It will leave the Kennedy Space Center’s Vehicle Assembly Building at 5:00 pm Eastern Time (2100 GMT) and begin its glacially slow, 11-hour crawl on a transporter to the hallowed Launch Complex 39B, four miles (6.5 kilometers) away.

Here’s what you need to know.
Huge rocket, huge cost

With the Orion crew capsule fixed on top, the Space Launch System (SLS) Block 1 stands 322 feet...

Aided by microbes found in the subarctic conditions of Canada’s Hudson Bay, an international team of scientists has created the first color catalog of icy planet surface signatures to uncover the existence of life in the cosmos.

As ground-based and space telescopes get larger and can probe the atmosphere of rocky exoplanets, astronomers need a color-coded guide to compare them and their moons to vibrant, tinted biological microbes on Earth, which may dominate frozen worlds that circle different stars.

But researchers need to know what microbes that live in frigid places on Earth look ...

The record-breaking beam is powered by a pulsar, a rapidly rotating collapsed star with a strong magnetic field.

With its tremendous scale, this beam may help explain the surprisingly large numbers of positrons, the antimatter counterparts to electrons, throughout the Milky Way galaxy.

Astronomers first discovered the beam, or filament, in 2020, but they did not know its full length because it extended beyond the edge of the Chandra detector. New Chandra observations by the same pair of researchers taken in February and November 2021 show the filament is about three times as long as originally seen. The filament spans about half the diameter of the full Moon on the sky, making it the longest one from a pulsar as seen from Earth.

“It’s amazing that a pulsar that’s only 10 mile...