Solar System
Voyager 1 thrusters, inoperable for 21 years, fixed from 15 billion miles away
Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California have revived a set of thrusters aboard the Voyager 1 spacecraft that had been considered inoperable since 2004. Fixing the thrusters required creativity and risk, but the team wants to have them available as a backup to a set of active thrusters whose fuel tubes are …
New theory explains how water first arrived on Earth
When Earth first formed, it was too hot to retain ice. This means all the water on our planet must have originated from extraterrestrial sources. Studies of ancient terrestrial rocks suggest liquid water existed on Earth as early as 100 million years after the Sun’s formation–practically “immediately” on an astrophysical timescale. This water, now over …
Building blocks of life found within asteroid Bennu
A bright fireball streaked across the sky above mountains, glaciers and spruce forest near the town of Revelstoke in British Columbia, Canada, on the evening of March 31, 1965. Fragments of this meteorite, discovered by beaver trappers, fell over a lake. A layer of ice saved them from the depths and allowed scientists a peek …
NEOWISE’s mission to catalog objects around Earth ends
The NASA project NEOWISE, which has given astronomers a detailed view of near-Earth objects – some of which could strike the Earth – ended its mission and burned on reentering the atmosphere after nearly 15 years in space. On a clear night, the sky is full of bright objects – from stars, large planets and …
Missions to probe if subsurface oceans of Jupiter moons could support life
On Oct. 14, 2024, NASA launched a robotic spacecraft named Europa Clipper to Jupiter’s moons. Clipper will reach the ice-covered Jovian moon Europa in 2030 and spend several years collecting and sending valuable data on the moon’s potential habitability back to Earth. Clipper isn’t the only mission highlighting researchers’ interest in Jupiter and its moons. …
Psyche visit of a metal world may reveal mysteries of Earth’s interior
French novelist Jules Verne delighted 19th-century readers with the tantalizing notion that a journey to the center of the Earth was actually plausible. Since then, scientists have long acknowledged that Verne’s literary journey was only science fiction. The extreme temperatures of the Earth’s interior – around 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit (5,537 Celsius) at the core – …