Space news
Sector news aggregated from reference outlets, always linking to the original source.
August 16, 2026
The Soviet Venera 13 lander survived 127 minutes on the surface of Venus in March 1982, sending home the first colour photographs from another planet — and the only audio recording ever made from…
The post APOD: 2026 August 16 – Milky Way over Yellowstone appeared first on NASA Science .
A Great Basin bristlecone pine in California's White Mountains, sampled by researcher Tom Harlan, germinated around 3050 BCE — five centuries before the Great Pyramid was built — and is still alive…
Alan Shepard's 15-minute Mercury flight in May 1961 was delayed so long on the pad that he had to urinate inside a suit engineers had never designed for it — and the fix set the template for every…
A 4.5-millimetre jellyfish off the coast of Japan responds to injury or starvation by collapsing into a blob and regrowing as a juvenile polyp — with no known upper limit on how many times it can…
A tributary in the Peruvian Amazon reaches 86 degrees Celsius along a six-kilometre stretch, with no volcano within 700 kilometres. Geologists trace the heat to rainwater circulating kilometres deep…
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SpaceX launched two of its Falcon 9 rockets just 38 minutes apart on Saturday evening (Aug. 15), setting a new spaceflight record.
At the moment of liftoff, SpaceX’s Starship pushes off the launch pad with approximately 74.4 million newtons of thrust — enough force, in principle, to lift roughly 7,500 tonnes of mass directly…
Webb has confirmed a richer and more luminous cosmic dawn than many pre-launch models forecast, pressing hardest on uncertain galaxy physics rather than yet overturning ΛCDM. The post JWST has spent…
DarkSky International—acting alongside the American Bird Conservancy, Environment America, and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER)—filed a formal Application for Review…
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August 15, 2026
The batch of eight Globalstar satellites will help refresh the company’s low Earth orbit constellation. Liftoff from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station is scheduled for 9:12 p.m. EDT (0112…
NASA plans to award three more lunar missions this year through a commercial services program, including an orbiter that would replace the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter The post Lunar orbiter among…
Cassini established that Enceladus may be habitable, but a scientifically useful failure to find life would require repeated, complementary measurements designed to make a false negative unlikely…
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As Blue Origin continues restoring its primary launch pad at LC-36A, the company has released… The post Blue Origin overviews plan for dual pad ops at Cape Canaveral appeared first on…
Earth observation satellites help us monitor phenomena such as wildfires, droughts and heatwaves from space. These images show how the effects of climate change on…
A new study warns that astronomers measuring the rotation of distant exoplanets may often be measuring atmospheric winds instead, since the clouds of Venus circle the planet roughly 60 times faster…
Radical-pair reactions in retinal cryptochromes offer a plausible quantum compass for birds, but neither the receptor in a living bird nor a subjective visual overlay has been directly demonstrated…
Open Questions in Galactic Wind Physics and Phenomenology. Speaker: Todd Thompson, Professor and Department Chair, Ohio State University The post DGCE SIG Seminar, 27 Aug 2026 appeared first on NASA…
Broad Band X-ray Observatory Science Analysis Group The post XR SIG Seminar, 21 Aug 2026 appeared first on NASA Science .
Physics of the Cosmos Third Early Career Workshop. 22-24 September 2026 The post Third Early Career Workshop, Sept 2026 appeared first on NASA Science .
Zhurong's imagery and spectra support a primary selenite layer in late Amazonian terrain, but microscopic brine inclusions remain a prediction for future in-situ analysis or sample return. The post…
Patients in Germany reported symptoms after watching the phenomenon without eye protection; doctors warn of retinal damage…
NASA is planning to send three small rovers to the moon with a single instruction: Work out among yourselves how to explore a patch of ground.
A June reanalysis cuts GJ 3378 b's radial-velocity minimum mass from 5.26 to 2.3 Earth masses, strengthening the case for a rocky world while leaving its atmosphere and habitability unknown. The…
A new paper published in Physical Review Letters reveals that a leading dark matter candidate—the hypothetical "dark photon"—would not have heated the early universe as previously thought. The…
In wait-a-minute style, forget the competition between the U.S. and China to newly place human footprints on the Moon. Also, you can overlook any one-upmanship about dispatching astronauts to Mars…
Though it's due to launch in 2028 to explore Titan, the Dragonfly space probe is still in testing phases. Latest milestone: checking its heat shield, which…
A squid preserved since the 1955–56 whaling season has been recognised as Mobydickia poseidonii, the only known member of a newly described oceanic squid family. The post A squid pulled from a sperm…
Neptune's moon and ring system stand out among the giant planets because of the strange imbalance between its one very large moon and its many tiny moons. Its largest moon, Triton, makes up more…
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