Marina Koren
When a Mars Simulation Goes Wrong
A recent mission atop a Hawaiian volcano shows humans still have much to learn before they set foot on another world.
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Win McNamee / Getty Space Suits for Spiders
And what they tell us about the difficulty of keeping people alive in space
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Kyle Grillot / Reuters When Elon Musk Switches on ‘Insane Mode’
“Someone with his combination of character traits—you’re always going to get the good with the bad.”
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Neil deGrasse Tyson, #MeToo, and the Celebrity Photo Op
A picture with a famous person can cause uncomfortable misunderstandings or, worse still, encourage predatory behavior.
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Dmitri Lovetsky / AP Soyuz Is Back in Business
Russia has resumed crewed flights to the International Space Station after a failed attempt. That’s good news for NASA.
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sdecoret / Nerthuz / Henrik Lehnerer / Shutterstock ... How to Build a Museum in Outer Space
Researchers have begun to imagine how the people of the future might visit exhibits in orbit or on the moon.
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Space Telescope Science Institute / NASA How to Measure All the Starlight in the Universe
Astrophysicists have devised a clever way to count up the photons in space, stretching back to the cosmos’ adolescence.
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Mike Blake / Reuters NASA Administrator on Elon Musk: ‘That Was Not Appropriate Behavior’
Jim Bridenstine recently told the SpaceX founder he doesn’t want NASA contractors engaging in questionable behavior.
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University of Arizona / JPL-Caltech / NASA The Dawn of Interplanetary Geology
NASA’s newest Mars mission is poised to transform the most terrestrial of sciences.
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Jan Havlicek / Shutterstock / NASA / The ... Reefer Madness at NASA
The space agency has reportedly decided to review workplace culture at SpaceX and Boeing after Elon Musk smoked marijuana on a podcast.
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Earth Observatory / NASA Hawaii’s Mars Simulations Are Turning Into Moon Missions
The dome where crew members practiced red-planet missions will now be converted to a simulated moon base.
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NASA/Reuters Landing on Mars Is Still Hard
NASA is planning for its tenth Mars-landing attempt next week. If it succeeds, the feat will be worth celebrating.
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Doug Scaletta via Scholastic / Katie Martin / ... The Fleeting Magic of Scholastic Book Fairs
Years later, many adults still pine for the days their school libraries, auditoriums, and gyms transformed into pop-up bookstores.
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M. Kornmesser / ESO A Surprise Discovery Around a Lonely Star
A planet more than three times the mass of Earth may be orbiting in a star system long thought to be barren.
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NASA / Roscosmos If Everyone Left the International Space Station
A recent launch failure presented an unsettling possibility for humankind’s home above Earth.
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Alex Gallardo / AP Trump's Space Force Faces an Uncertain Fate
Congressional lawmakers, including Republicans, were skeptical of the idea long before the midterms.
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J. David Ake / AP The Republican Space Fans Exiting the House
The next Congress will be missing a few longtime advocates of exploration.
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Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Carnegie ... The Incredible Shrinking Planet
Mercury has shriveled over billions of years, and it’s got the landforms to prove it.
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ESO / Gravity Consortium / L. Calçada About That Monstrous Black Hole We’re All Orbiting
You don’t want to get stuck there.
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JPL / NASA An Ode to the Spacecraft That Filled the Galaxy With Planets
NASA’s beloved exoplanet-searching mission has run out of fuel, but not before enriching our understanding of the cosmos.
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Leah Millis / Reuters Lawrence Krauss and the Legacy of Harassment in Science
The theoretical physicist isn’t the first celebrity scientist to be accused of sexual misconduct, but he is the first to face consequences.
