Astronomy

When NASA's Artemis II spacecraft carried four astronauts around the Moon earlier this year, the world's largest fully steerable radio telescope was quietly watching from a quiet valley in West Virginia. The Green Bank Telescope tracked the Orion capsule across 213,000 miles of empty space with a precision that would embarrass most speedometers and what it produced isn't just an engineering triumph. It's a glimpse of how the world's most sensitive ears are becoming indispensable to the future of human spaceflight.

What does it mean for

You’re an anaerobic microbe sunbathing on a Martian beach billions of years ago listening to the small waves hit the shoreline as you take in the perchlorates in the Martian regolith. This is because while Mars is warm and wet, it still lacks sufficient oxygen, so anaerobic life like yourself doesn’t need oxygen to survive. You’re chilling for several hours and eventually notice the water hasn’t touched you. You remember over-hearing some otherworldly fellows who briefly landed and discussed the landscape didn’t look well formed, so they left.

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Probability theory and the Saint Petersburg paradox can help you determine whether the stakes of a game are too great

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NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover recently took a self-portrait against a sweeping backdrop of ancient Martian terrain at a location the science team calls “Lac de Charmes.”

This test flight comes at a pivotal moment for Elon Musk’s SpaceX as the company pushes to go public this year and show it’s ready for NASA’s planned 2027 Artemis III mission

For the last 1.7 million years, China’s Yangtze River has been stealing water from the Yellow River, new research shows

A multiyear effort to rename polycystic ovary syndrome finally revealed the condition’s new name: polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome

Margaret Hamilton designed safety features for NASA inspired in part by her four-year-old

NASA’s Mars rovers have found traces of minerals akin to those that make up precious gems on Earth. But their appearance and abundance on Mars is likely very different, experts say

Researchers who study political violence say that the U.S. is in a period of more intense political rhetoric, but there have been far darker periods in the nation’s history

'Wake up and ask yourself, 'Is what I'm doing helping us get back to the moon?' … If it's not, stop doing it.'

It was the 114th Falcon 9 mission of 2025 already.

"This shows how effective the approach of 'Discover with Subaru Telescope, explore with James Webb' can be."

The new finding may solve an "astrophysics mystery that has stood for nearly half a century."

"Sometimes it's the extreme objects that help us understand what's happening in the average ones."

These celestial wonders can tell us a lot about the state of the atmosphere at home on Earth as well as on other planets.