Tag Archives: Spacecraft

Astronomers at the Pan-STARRS Observatory in Hawaii made history in 2017 when they detected ‘Oumuamua, the first interstellar object (ISO) ever observed. Two years later, the interstellar comet 2I/Borisov became the second ISO ever observed. And on July 1st, 2025, the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) in Rio Hurtado detected a third interstellar object in our Solar System, the …

An astrophysicist has made an ambitious proposal for how humanity could probe the extreme physics of black holes — by sending a spaceship no bigger than a paperclip to our nearest one. The spacecraft, no heavier than a gram and propelled to a third of the speed of light by lasers on Earth, would gather information on a nearby space-time …

A team of engineers has come up with designs of a 36-mile spacecraft, dubbed Chrysalis, designed to carry up to 2,400 passengers to Alpha Centauri, the closest star system to our own. As first spotted by Live Science, the ambitious vision recently won the team the top prize at the Project Hyperion Design Competition, which was launched last year by …

The Hera mission to follow-up on the aftermath of NASA’s DART asteroid crash has caught sight of two other asteroids in an important test of its camera ahead of its rendezvous its main target: the double space rock system of Didymos and Dimorphos. In September of 2022, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART for short, slammed into the small …

Future technology could one day allow a miniature, laser-propelled spacecraft — no heavier than a paperclip — to travel to a nearby black hole, according to a bold new proposal published on Thursday (Aug. 7). The ambitious mission would aim to test the limits of Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity in one of the universe’s most extreme environments. It …

Black holes are some of the most mysterious objects in the Universe – a reputation not helped by the difficulty of studying them. Because these ultra-dense objects emit no light we can detect, we have to study them based on the effect they have on the space around them, from large distances across space-time. But there could be another way …

Engineers have designed a spacecraft that could take up to 2,400 people on a one-way trip to Alpha Centauri, the star system closest to our own. The craft, called Chrysalis, could make the 25 trillion mile (40 trillion kilometer) journey in around 400 years, the engineers say in their project brief, meaning many of its potential passengers would only know …

NASA is having trouble tracking down two of its spacecraft. One of the TRACERS spacecraft has lost contact with Earth while the Athena EPIC satellite failed to send an important beacon signal. Both were launched on July 23 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Communicating with both has, thus far, proven a challenge …

The four crewmembers of NASA’s next moon mission are moving closer to their upcoming launch. The Artemis 2 crew consists of NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman (commander), Victor Glover (pilot), Christina Koch (mission specialist) and the Canadian Space Agency’s Jeremy Hansen. After experiencing multiple delays, the quartet is scheduled to launch no earlier than April 2026 on their 10-day mission around …

During a solar eclipse, astronomers who study heliophysics are able to study the Sun’s corona – its outer atmosphere – in ways they are unable to do at any other time. The brightest part of the Sun is so bright that it blocks the faint light from the corona, so it is invisible to most of the instruments astronomers use. …