Space

On Sept. 7 2025, the skies darkened as Earth’s shadow consumed the moon. Skywatchers in many parts of the world saw the moon turn blood red due to a total lunar eclipse. For amateur astronomers Michael Jäger and Gerald Rhemann in Namibia, the eclipse was not only a sight to behold, but it also gave them an unprecedented opportunity: the chance to capture the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS…

NASA’s acting administrator is pushing back against recent claims that the agency is losing ground to China in the race back to the moon. Sean Duffy addressed employees in an internal NASA town hall last week, just one day after Senate testimony suggested that China may land astronauts at the lunar south pole before the U.S. does so. “I’ll be damned if that is the story that we…

A potentially huge discovery by NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover will likely remain in scientific limbo for years to come. On Wednesday (Sept. 10), the Perseverance team announced it found possible biosignatures in pieces of a Mars rock called “Cheyava Falls” that the rover first studied last year. Those intriguing chemical fingerprints include the iron-containing minerals…

The odd dwarf planet Quaoar might have a brand-new moon. Observations of the tiny world, made by a pair of astronomers in California, suggest it possesses either a second satellite or a third ring. Quaoar and our solar system’s other dwarf planets are generally so far away that they are a challenge to view directly from Earth. (An exception is Ceres, which lies in the main asteroid belt…