Stories from Payload’s weekly space science newsletter, Parallax.
Forget your dreams of harnessing the awesome power of antimatter to hover and float through the air in the science-fiction world of the future. As it turns out, that approach would leave you in the lurch. For the first time, researchers at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) have experimentally demonstrated that, just like […]
Everyone’s favorite roiling, sulfuric hellscape just got a little more interesting. For the first time, scientists have identified active volcanism on Venus. Cutting through the clouds Venus doesn’t make studying it easy for scientists. Its clouds are dense and shiny, making telescope observations from afar very difficult, and the incredible heat and pressure of the […]
We know less about the vast, mysterious universe we live in than we can even begin to comprehend. For thousands of years, astronomers have looked out to the heavens to try to make sense of it all, and bit by bit, we’ve increased our understanding of how it all works. Now, researchers may have made […]
A mission set to explore the distant, icy moons of Jupiter is go for launch. This week, Airbus announced that the JUpiter ICy moons Explorer (JUICE, at a stretch) mission is fully assembled in Toulouse, France, and is undergoing final testing before it’s shipped to French Guiana ahead of a planned launch in April. The […]
To get a clear, untouched view of the night sky, a person has to travel to the remotest corners of the Earth, far from any city or town where artificial light blocks out the delicate light from the stars. The sky that most of humanity sees at night is obscured by a filmy haze of […]
JWST has confirmed its first exoplanet—and it’s a good one. Using the NIRSpec (Near-Infrared Spectrograph) instrument aboard the orbiting telescope, scientists identified an exoplanet (i.e., a planet in a star system besides our own) in the LHS 475 star system that’s about as similar to Earth as any we’ve found. The planet, called LHS 475 […]
Here we are, in the final weeks of 2022, having learned so much about the vast, mysterious universe we live in. Here’s a recap of some of the biggest moments in space science this year. Eyes on the sky Last Christmas, NASA launched the James Webb Space Telescope in its mission to, as the agency […]
NASA’s triumphant return to the Moon has begun. Right now, Artemis I is coming to an end, as the Orion capsule hurtles back from lunar orbit for a planned splashdown this weekend. Over the next few years, NASA is planning to lay the groundwork to prepare for long-haul trips to Mars. There’s a lot of […]
In September 2020, a team of astronomers made waves across the scientific community when they reported they’d identified phosphine, a potential marker of life, in the atmosphere of Venus. Now, NASA says those findings were too good to be true. What’s the big deal about Venus? Venus remains somewhat of a mystery to us. It’s […]
It finally happened. SLS made it off the ground, and as you read this, the Orion capsule is en route to the Moon. Though the main spectacle was certainly NASA’s $4.1B, 322-foot-tall rocket lifting off and launching Orion farther than any human-rated spacecraft has gone before, that’s not all that Artemis I had going for […]
On Sunday, Northrop Grumman launched the NG-18 mission, sending a Cygnus full of supplies and new science experiments to the ISS. After the Antares launcher deployed the Cygnus capsule, a problem arose: One of the craft’s two solar arrays failed to deploy. Luckily, it still had enough power to reach the station. Early yesterday morning, […]
Peering through the light-warping haze of the atmosphere at twilight, astronomers made a rare discovery: Three huge near-Earth asteroids, each capable of causing the next mass extinction event on Earth. Now, before I get ahead of myself, these asteroids aren’t headed for Earth. Two of the three will orbit completely inside Earth’s orbit, never crossing, […]
