Space

On Sept. 4, 1962, NASA’s Mariner 2 spacecraft performed the first-ever rocket maneuver in deep space as it did a quick mid-course correction on its way to Venus. It had launched just eight days earlier and needed to burn its engines to ensure that its trajectory would take it to Venus. The midcourse maneuver was necessary because the Atlas-Agena rocket that launched Mariner 2 didn’t…

On Sept. 3, 2006, a European satellite named SMART-1 crashed into the moon! This wasn’t actually as disastrous as it sounds, because the spacecraft did it on purpose. SMART-1 launched in 2003 and was the first European spacecraft to go to the moon. It was also the first mission of a program called Small Missions for Advanced Research in Technology, which was a series of low-cost spacecraft…

You may have seen the International Space Station whizzing across the night sky before, but have you ever seen China’s Tiangong space station? Three taikonauts are currently orbiting Earth aboard the Tiangong space station — and just days after two of them spent 5.5 hours outside the station repairing a solar array, there are particularly good opportunities to see it from parts of the…

Some stars encounter supermassive black holes and live to tell the tale. New research shows why the flares these encounters cause dim over repeated episodes, and it may be down to the way these stars spin and an escaping binary partner that leaves them to be a stellar snack for a black hole. Some stars are unfortunate enough to encounter the supermassive black holes that sit at the heart of every…