A single colossal impact may have rapidly spread water across Mercury and locked much of it into permanently shadowed polar craters — all within the span of a single Mercurian day, or 176 Earth days, according to a new study.
Being the closest planet to the sun, Mercury seems like the last place in the solar system where water ice should survive. The sun appears nearly three times larger in…
Two Russian cosmonauts worked to install and retrieve science experiments while on a spacewalk outside the International Space Station on Wednesday (May 27).
Expedition 74 commander Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and flight engineer Sergei Mikaev spent 6 hours and 5 minutes outside…
China shakes up its space programs to land astronauts on the moon by 2030: 'We will spare no effort'
May 28, 2026
China is establishing an integrated program called the Lunar Exploration Program, melding both its robotic Chang’e lunar probe activities with the country’s human spaceflight program. Zhang Jingbo, spokesman for the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) agency, made the…
What is Star City, the secret Cold War cosmonaut training town in Apple TV's new 'For All Mankind' spinoff?
May 28, 2026
On May 29, Apple TV will launch “Star City,” their 10-episode spinoff of “For All Mankind” that depicts an alternate history of the space race from the Soviet perspective as they become the first nation to land a human on the moon instead of the United States.
But far from being pure fiction, “Star City” is based on the real-life hidden Russian city just outside Moscow where…
Anyone who has been paying attention to cosmology over the past few years is aware of problems with our best attempts to explain why the universe is the way it is.
Our standard model, Lambda-CDM (or LCDM), is one of the most successful theories in the history of science. It…
Unusual red northern lights over Japan suggest some solar storms are stronger than we thought
May 27, 2026
A rare crimson aurora glowing over northern Japan may be a sign that some solar storms are more powerful than scientists once believed.
Researchers studying faint red auroras observed above Japan in June 2024 found that the displays stretched far higher into Earth’s…
'Very interesting wiggles' in data from silent NASA Mars spacecraft lead to unexpected solar wind discovery
May 27, 2026
Even as NASA continues to try to restore contact with the MAVEN spacecraft after it fell silent in late 2025, scientists analyzing its data have spotted a phenomenon in Mars’ atmosphere that, until now, had only been observed around strongly magnetized planets like Earth.
The finding could help scientists better understand how space weather shapes worlds without protective magnetic shields…
DARPA is at last ready to test fueling up satellites in faraway Earth orbits, to keep those machines working a little bit longer.
DARPA’s (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) long-delayed Robotic Servicing of Geosynchronous Satellite (RSGS) demonstrator is slated…
NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray spacecraft has observed a super-bright, supercharged supernova explosion that may have been powered up by a highly magnetic dead star, a type of neutron star called a magnetar. This magnetar would have actually been born in the supernova itself…
In northeastern California lies a series of caves that formed thousands of years ago when volcanoes erupted lava that later solidified, leaving behind tunnels wide enough for humans to walk through. But Earth isn’t the only planet in our solar system with volcanoes — extraterrestrial caves formed all across the solar system.
Take Mars, for instance. Millions of years before life on Earth came…
