Space

Two commercial spacecraft pulled off a surprise rendezvous in Earth orbit recently, showcasing skills that could pave the way for satellite servicing missions down the road. The milestone came on a mission called Remora, a newly revealed collaboration between the companies Starfish Space and Impulse Space. One of Impulse Space’s dishwasher-sized Mira orbital transfer vehicles used Starfish…

The U.S. Space Force is getting serious about drone threats. Space Force is looking to boost its ability to deter and defeat uncrewed aerial systems (UAS) in the vicinity of Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and the Eastern Range, the 15-million-square-mile (39 million square kilometers) stretch of airspace over the Atlantic Ocean through which the United States launches most of its space…

For the first time, scientists have mapped vast, continent-scale river drainage systems on Mars — ancient networks that may also be among the most promising places to search for signs of past life. Billions of years ago, before the Red Planet became the frigid desert it is today, water sculpted its surface on a massive scale. For decades, Mars has tempted scientists with whispered clues of that…

The Voyager 2 mission may have caught Uranus at a special time during which the ice giant’s radiation belts were being supercharged with electrons accelerated by a similar process to what can drive geomagnetic storms on Earth. This realization, resulting from placing old data from Voyager 2 under new scrutiny, could help explain several puzzling aspects of Uranus’s magnetic…