Since InSight’s landing on Mars late last year, it’s been hard at work studying what lays beneath the surface of the Red Planet. The lander's mission is to understand Mars’ deep interior, what it’s made of and how the planet moves. To that end, InSight has been studying the area around it, practicing its movements, and scouting the best locations to place instruments. And now, the science is kicking into gear.  InSight's Mission So Far To accomplish it ...read more

Asteroid exploration has been all the rage lately, and the European Space Agency (ESA) isn’t missing out on the fun. On February 4, ESA released new details about its upcoming Hera mission — the first spacecraft to explore a binary asteroid. The mission will launch to asteroid 65803 Didymos, a binary pair made up of one large body and a smaller object that orbits around it, in 2023. Aptly nicknamed Didymoon, the smaller of the two stretches just&nb ...read more

While New Horizons is exploring new targets, researchers are still working on the mountains of data it returned in 2015 from its visit to Pluto and its moon Charon. Charon is Pluto's largest companion, and like Pluto, it has a complicated, icy surface dotted with mountains and canyons. Large parts of Charon's surface appear to have been resurfaced in the past, leading to theories of an underground ocean that could have erupted long ago. New Horizons’ best views of Charon were of its side ...read more

Trying to model what the cascading impact of anthropogenic climate change might be around the world is challenging to say the least. This isn't a simple relationship where global average temperature goes up and everything changes in concert. As we've seen in the United States with the Polar Vortex, a warmer average global climate can also mean much colder short-term weather as typical patterns are perturbed by the chain of events caused by warming. So, as the dominoes fall in a changing glob ...read more

(Inside Science) -- Researchers from Japan have come up with a way to encourage materials to grow stronger over time, like the muscles in our body. The new technique could allow engineers to design adaptable and healable materials for a wide range of applications. When we lift weights in the gym, the mechanical stress causes our muscle fibers to rip and tear, but this damaging action actually allows the fibers to regrow stronger afterwards. In contrast, nonliving materials such as rubber ...read more

Thanks to a mashup of science and industry, researchers have developed a prototype spacecraft that can mine water from an asteroid, use that water to generate steam, then use that steam as fuel to hop across the surface of an asteroid — or even jump to an entirely different world altogether. The prototype spacecraft — named The World Is Not Enough (WINE) — was largely developed by Honeybee Robotics in Pasadena, California, with plenty of help from planetary ...read more

All day every day, throughout the United States, people push buttons – on coffee makers, TV remote controls and even social media posts they “like.” For more than seven years, I’ve been trying to understand why, looking into where buttons came from, why people love them – and why people loathe them. As I researched my recent book, “Power Button: A History of Pleasure, Panic, and the Politics of Pushing,” about the origins of American push-button society ...read more

The ocean is rich in diverse shades of blue and green. Now researchers find climate change will alter the color of the oceans by the end of the 21st century. The changes won't be dramatic, in fact, they likely won't be visible to the naked eye, but it suggests that the hue of the ocean could be an important marker for scientists watching to see how climate change will affect our seas. “Ocean color will give us an earlier signal of climate change effects on the marine ecosystem t ...read more

The shape of the Milky Way, usually pictured as a flat spiral, may actually be more like a warped and twisted disk. That's according to a new study of 1,339 stars whose distances could be measured with great accuracy. The resulting map reveals a tipped, uneven disk of material different from our standard picture. Mapping Pulsating Stars The 1,339 stars are all Cepheid variables, a type of pulsating star whose intrinsic brightness depends on how long it takes to vary from bright to ...read more

Gazing up at the sky, it's hard not to imagine the sun, moon, stars, and planets as part of an inverted bowl over our heads, even if we know that's an antiquated way of viewing the heavens. These days, we understand it’s the Earth that’s spinning, spinning daily like a ballerina while also circling the sun on its yearly journey. But the bowl imagery was and remains a reasonable way of envisioning how the skies appear to revolve around us, and when certain stars appear or disappear wi ...read more