Europa could harbor complex life, and we’ll have to take care to avoid any cross-contamination. (credit: Ted Stryk/NASA) The Beresheet crash landed on Earth’s Moon in 2019. Part of the ill-fated Israeli lunar lander’s payload was a bunch of tardigrades, or “water bears.” These organisms are under a millimeter long and can survive extreme cold […]
Prince William doesn’t see the point in rushing into space when we have bigger issues to deal with on our home planet! The future king sat down for an interview on BBC’s Newscast podcast this week and slammed the space tourism frenzy, explaining that the billionaires who are spending planet-sized sums in the next space […]
Experience the mission to repair the Advanced Mass Spectrometer (AMS) aboard the International Space Station in Among the Stars, an original documentary series now streaming on Disney+. It’s problematic enough when something goes wrong with a complicated, $2 billion physics experiment on Earth. Those challenges are considerably greater when said physics experiment is on the […]
Demi Lovato is embarking on a whole new journey! On Thursday, the pop star’s new show Unidentified With Demi Lovato drops on Peacock, and ahead of its release they are opening up about the mindblowing UFO encounter that inspired the extra-terrestrial project! While chatting with E! News’ Daily Pop on Monday, the musician, who uses […]
Enlarge / See these solar panels in space? They’re way too heavy to economically provide power to Earth. (credit: NASA) “This is an idea that’s older than even the space program,” Caltech’s Harry Atwater told Ars over Zoom. Citing Asimov and Clarke, Atwater conjured an image of gleaming solar panels floating above the Earth on […]
Enlarge (credit: NASA) Last week, NASA’s Perseverance rover shot for a new milestone in the search for extraterrestrial life: drilling into Mars to extract a plug of rock, which will eventually get fired back to Earth for scientists to study. Data sent to NASA scientists early on August 6 indicated a victory—the robot had indeed […]
Enlarge / It sure looks like a crab, but it isn’t. Why are crab-like forms so common? (credit: David Kirkland / Design Pics ) Many organisms on planet Earth aren’t crabs. Dogs, for instance—definitely not crabs. Science also suggests that humans are not, in fact, crabs. But a surprising number of creatures either are crabs […]
Ashton Kutcher was this close to going to space… until Mila Kunis talked some sense into him that is! The That 70s Show actress reminded her former co-star (and hubby and baby daddy) that he’s got a family with young children at home, and maybe space travel isn’t the smartest thing to be doing at this […]
Enlarge (credit: NASA ) NASA announced on Friday that it has switched to backup computing hardware on the Hubble Space Telescope, potentially ending over a month of uncertainty regarding the telescope’s future. The success came just two days after the agency indicated that it had narrowed down the source of the original fault. The iconic […]
Enlarge / Even with today’s real estate boom, a supermassive black hole in the neighborhood has to drive the asking price down a bit, right? (credit: Caltech/R. Hurt (IPAC) / Redfin / Nathan Mattise) Black holes flood the Universe. The nearest one is a mere 1,500 lightyears away. A giant one, Sagittarius A*, sits in […]