Space Exploration News – Latest Headlines

Subscribe to our Space Exploration News feed

Last mission for the ATV European space freighter

So far, four European space freighters have carried supplies to the International Space Station (ISS). At 01:47 CEST on 30 July 2014, Georges Lemaitre - the fifth and last European Space Agency (ESA) Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) - lifted off from the spaceport at Kourou in French Guiana.

Jul 30th, 2014

Young binary star system may form planets with weird and wild orbits

While surveying a series of binary stars, astronomers uncovered a striking pair of wildly misaligned planet-forming disks in the young binary star system HK Tau.

Jul 30th, 2014

Revolutionary microshutter technology hurdles significant challenges

NASA technologists have hurdled a number of significant technological challenges in their quest to improve an already revolutionary observing technology originally created for the James Webb Space Telescope.

Jul 30th, 2014

Less to the Milky Way than previously thought

The Milky Way is less massive than astronomers previously thought, according to new research. For the first time, scientists have been able to precisely measure the mass of the galaxy that contains our Solar system.

Jul 30th, 2014

Mysterious molecules in space

A group of scientists has offered a tantalizing new possibility: these mysterious molecules may be silicon-capped hydrocarbons like SiC3H, SiC4H and SiC5H, and they present data and theoretical arguments to back that hypothesis.

Jul 29th, 2014

Long-lived Mars Opportunity rover sets off-world driving record

NASA's Opportunity Mars rover, which landed on the Red Planet in 2004, now holds the off-Earth roving distance record after accruing 25 miles (40 kilometers) of driving. The previous record was held by the Soviet Union's Lunokhod 2 rover.

Jul 28th, 2014

Researchers discover cool-burning flames in space that could lead to better engines here on earth

A team of international researchers has discovered a new type of cool burning flames that could lead to cleaner, more efficient engines for cars. The discovery was made during a series of experiments on the International Space Station.

Jul 28th, 2014

Next-generation Thirty Meter Telescope begins construction in Hawaii

Following the approval of a sublease on July 25 by the Hawaii Board of Land and Natural Resources, the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) announces the beginning of the construction phase on Hawaii Island.

Jul 28th, 2014

Glow in space is evidence of a hot bubble in our galaxy

A recent study shows that the emission is dominated by the local hot bubble of gas - 1 million degrees - with, at most, 40 percent of emission originating within the solar system. The findings should put to rest the disagreement about the origin of the X-ray emission and confirm the existence of the local hot bubble.

Jul 28th, 2014

Comet with a collar

OSIRIS images of Rosetta's comet resolve structures at 100 metres pixel scale.

Jul 24th, 2014

New mass map of a distant galaxy cluster is the most precise yet

Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have mapped the mass within a galaxy cluster more precisely than ever before. Created using observations from Hubble's Frontier Fields observing programme, the map shows the amount and distribution of mass within MCS J0416.1-2403, a massive galaxy cluster found to be 160 trillion times the mass of the Sun.

Jul 24th, 2014

Hubble finds three surprisingly dry exoplanets

Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have gone looking for water vapor in the atmospheres of three planets orbiting stars similar to the sun - and have come up nearly dry.

Jul 24th, 2014

Voyager spacecraft might not have reached interstellar space

In 2012, the Voyager mission team announced that the Voyager 1 spacecraft had passed into interstellar space, traveling further from Earth than any other manmade object. But, in the nearly two years since that historic announcement, and despite subsequent observations backing it up, uncertainty about whether Voyager 1 really crossed the threshold continues.

Jul 23rd, 2014

Satellite galaxies put astronomers in a spin

An international team of researchers has studied 380 galaxies and shown that their small satellite galaxies almost always move in rotating discs. However, such satellite galaxy discs are not predicted by current models of the formation of structures in the Universe. This discovery could cause modelers serious headaches in the years ahead.

Jul 23rd, 2014

A new approach in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence: targeting alien polluters

Humanity is on the threshold of being able to detect signs of alien life on other worlds. By studying exoplanet atmospheres, we can look for gases like oxygen and methane that only coexist if replenished by life. But those gases come from simple life forms like microbes. What about advanced civilizations? Would they leave any detectable signs? They might, if they spew industrial pollution into the atmosphere.

Jul 23rd, 2014

Researchers model Titan's atmosphere

New work compares the chemical composition of Titan's atmosphere with parameters predicted by a mathematical model.

Jul 23rd, 2014

Astronomers pioneer a 'Google street view' of galaxies

A new home-grown instrument based on bundles of optical fibres is giving Australian astronomers the first 'Google street view' of the cosmos - incredibly detailed views of huge numbers of galaxies.

Jul 23rd, 2014

Lives and deaths of sibling stars

In this new image from La Silla Observatory in Chile young stars huddle together against clouds of glowing gas and lanes of dust. The star cluster, NGC 3293, would have been just a cloud of gas and dust itself about ten million years ago, but as stars began to form it became the bright group of stars we see here. Clusters like this are laboratories that allow astronomers to learn about how stars evolve.

Jul 23rd, 2014