Major smashups between rocky bodies shaped our solar system. Observations of a similar crash give clues about how frequent these events are around other stars. Most of the rocky planets and satellites in our solar system, including Earth and the Moon, were formed or shaped by massive collisions earl […]
Wally Funk delivers remarks after accepting the 2022 Michael Collins Trophy for Lifetime Achievement, Thursday, March 24, 2022, at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Va. The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum’s Michael Collins Trophy reco
Like a time capsule that was sealed for posterity, one of the last unopened Apollo-era lunar samples collected during Apollo 17 has been opened under the careful direction of lunar sample processors and curators in the Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science (ARES) Division at NASA’s Johnson
The first corned beef sandwich to orbit Earth was smuggled aboard Gemini III on March 23, 1965. As contraband unapproved for flight by NASA, pilot John Young had hidden the sandwich in a pocket of his spacesuit shortly before the launch. Around two hours into the almost five-hour long flight, he off
Not so long ago, humanity lived in a universe with only a small number of known planets, all of them orbiting our Sun. But a new raft of discoveries marks a scientific high point: More than 5,000 planets are now confirmed to exist beyond our solar system. The planetary odometer turned on March 21, w
This colorful image, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and published in 2018, celebrated the Earth-orbiting observatory’s 28th anniversary of viewing the heavens, giving us a window seat to the universe’s extraordinary tapestry of stellar birth and destruction. At the center of the photo, a monste
Earth’s Moon is seen rising behind NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket with the Orion spacecraft aboard atop a mobile launcher as it rolls out to Launch Complex 39B for the first time, Thursday, March 17, 2022, at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Ahead of the Artemis I flight test,
NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket with the Orion spacecraft aboard is seen atop a mobile launcher in High Bay 3 of the Vehicle Assembly Building. In this image taken on Wednesday, March 16, 2022, members of the media set up remote cameras to capture the first rollout to Launch Complex 39B at N
Dr. Eugene N. Parker, visionary of heliophysics and namesake of NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, has passed away. He was 94. As a young professor at the University of Chicago in the mid-1950s, Parker developed a mathematical theory that predicted the solar wind, the constant outflow of solar material from
In this image from August 2021, NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei sits and reads while aboard the International Space Station. Vande Hei made it into record books on Tuesday, March 15, 2022: He broke the record for the most consecutive days in space by an American explorer. Vande Hei arrived at the spac
