The launch abort system for NASA's Orion crew capsule will undergo its final test on Tuesday. (Credit: NASA) NASA has big plans for human spaceflight, aiming to put the first woman and next man on the Moon by 2024, a mission they're calling Artemis. To carry those astronauts, NASA has been developing the new Orion crew capsule and the Space Launch System (SLS), a rocket powerful enough to launch beyond low-Earth orbit. On Tuesday morning, NASA will test the launch abort safety system for ...read more

The diamond ring phase over Newberry, South Carolina, during the total solar eclipse August 21, 2017. (Credit: Michael Roudabush/Wikimedia Commons) Tuesday, July 2, will bring a special kind of darkness to South America. In certain parts of Chile and Argentina, people will find a strange twilight falling as the Moon inches across and ultimately covers the Sun’s disk completely in a total solar eclipse lasting just over two minutes for most observers. For those lucky people in the pat ...read more

The nearby red dwarf star TRAPPIST-1 has a system of seven Earth-size planets, all jammed into a space much smaller than the gap between the Sun and Mercury. (Credit: ESO/O. Furtak) When I was an astronomy-obsessed kid, I learned that most of the stars in our galaxy and beyond are very similar to our Sun. No less an authority than Carl Sagan wrote that "the Sun is an ordinary, even a mediocre star." If that insight diminished the importance of our place in the universe, it also made it seem ...read more