Marina Koren

In recent memory, a conversation about Elon Musk might have had two fairly balanced sides. There were the partisans of Visionary Elon, head of Tesla and SpaceX, a selfless billionaire who was putting his money toward what he believed would save the world. And there were critics of Egregious Elon, the unrepentant troll who spent a substantial amount of his time goading online hordes. These personas existed in a strange harmony, displays of brilliance balancing out bursts of terribleness.

Humans have long found meaning in the stars, but only recently have we begun to understand whole clusters of them—galaxies, way out in the depths of space. A few nearby galaxies, such as Andromeda, have always been visible to the naked eye as a dusky smear in the night sky.

In May 1957, an American fighter pilot stationed in the quiet English countryside was suddenly ordered to get into the air and shoot down an unidentified flying object. The pilot, Milton Torres, pursued the target, which appeared motionless at times before zooming at thousands of miles per hour. He locked on to the object and prepared to fire, but it vanished from radar screens.

Residents of Billings, Montana, encountered a rather strange sight this week: A giant white ball hovering in the sky in broad daylight. The ball drifted between clouds and shimmered in the sun. It looked almost like a second moon.American military officials suspect that the floating mystery object is a Chinese spy balloon. The high-altitude object, they say, traveled from China to Alaska and then Canada before crossing into the continental United States. The U.S.

Illustrations by Daniele CastellanoOf all the moons in the solar system, Saturn’s largest satellite might be the most extraordinary. Titan is enveloped in a thick, hazy atmosphere, and liquid methane rains gently from its sky, tugged downward by a fraction of the gravity we feel on Earth. The methane forms rivers, lakes, and small seas on Titan’s surface. Beneath the frigid ground, composed of ice as hard as rock, is even more liquid, a whole ocean of plain old H2O.

A couple of newly discovered asteroids whizzed past our planet earlier this month, tracing their own loop around the sun. These two aren’t any more special than the thousands of other asteroids in the ever-growing catalog of near-Earth objects. But a recent news article in The Jerusalem Post described them in a rather eye-catching, even startling, way: Each rock, the story said, is “around the size of 22 emperor penguins stacked nose to toes.

Noora Alsaeed has often thought about building a snowman on Mars.Let’s go over that again. A snowman on Mars? That desertlike, desolate planet over there? The one covered in sand? What an unusual daydream.But Alsaeed knows a few things that the rest of us don’t. She is a planetary scientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder whose work relies on data from a NASA spacecraft that orbits Mars.

In December of 1972, astronaut Eugene Cernan left his footprints and daughter’s initials in the lunar dust. In doing so, he became the last man to set foot on the moon. Now, after 50 years, humanity is going back. But in the half-century since Apollo 17, a lot has changed in how we explore space—and how we see our place in it.While those early missions were all run by governments, much of modern spaceflight is the domain of billionaires and their private companies.

Here is the happy part: For more than four years, a funky-looking spacecraft did something remarkable. It was in many ways just another robot, a combination of hardy materials, circuits, and sensors with a pair of solar panels jutting out like wings on an insect. But this particular robot has listened to the ground shake on Mars. It has felt marsquakes beneath its little mechanical feet.NASA and European space agencies designed the spacecraft to study these Martian quakes in detail.

The Mars rover was out and about, doing its normal rover things inside one of the red planet’s craters, when there was a sudden shift in the atmosphere. A vortex of air and dust had swirled into shape, and it was fast approaching. The rover, named Perseverance, didn’t move from its spot. The whirlwind slammed into the robot, tiny particles pinging its exterior. Within seconds, the bombardment was over, and the vortex was gone.Perseverance was fine.

Updated at 2:37 p.m. ET on December 11, 2022If you want to send people to the moon, you have to be able to bring them home safely. And if you want to bring them home, you must send them hurtling through Earth’s atmosphere in a wash of heat and fire.An incoming capsule exits space at thousands of miles per hour, then decelerates rapidly. The astronauts inside feel gravity reassert itself with an uncomfortable crush.

The new crew arrived at the International Space Station last week, all smiles and floating hair. There was, as usual, a little welcome ceremony, with heartfelt remarks from the newcomers streamed live for the people they left behind on Earth. A few of the astronauts floated above the others and turned upside down, hanging like bats, so that their beaming faces would fit into the frame.

The Hubble Space Telescope is falling.Not imminently, but it’s happening. The beloved observatory, which has spent decades revealing cosmic wonders from its perch a few hundred miles above Earth, does not have a propulsion system to maintain its altitude. According to NASA’s latest projections, the observatory could reenter Earth’s atmosphere as early as 2037—a grim fate that the agency has been anticipating for many years.

The space probe came barreling in at thousands of miles per hour, its mechanical eyes locked on its target—an asteroid named Dimorphos.About an hour out, the asteroid looked to the probe’s cameras like nothing more than a faint speck in the darkness of space, slightly larger than a single pixel on your screen. A few minutes out, it began to look distinctly asteroid-like, lumpy and gray.

Did you know that Neptune has rings?It’s true. The planet we’re now told is the farthest from us has a set of narrow bands made of dust. Planetary scientists know this, as do hard-core astronomy fans, probably. But for those of us who have certain textbook images of the solar system in our mind, the knowledge that Neptune is a ringed planet might come as a surprise.

Saturn has quite the collection of moons, more than any other planet in the solar system. There’s Enceladus, blanketed in ice, with a briny ocean beneath its surface. There’s Iapetus, half of which is dusty and dark, and the other shiny and bright. There are Hyperion, a rocky oval that bears a striking resemblance to a sea sponge, and Pan, tiny and shaped just like a cheese ravioli.But one moon might be missing.

By now, the spaceship should have been on its way to the moon. By now, NASA had hoped, the gumdrop-shaped capsule—designed to carry astronauts someday—would be sending all kinds of data back home, showing engineers how its first journey to space was going.But the capsule is still here, sitting atop a giant rocket that has so far refused to leave Earth.

Astronauts haven’t visited the moon in 50 years, but the United States is intent on taking them back. Hundreds of reporters from around the world traveled to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida this week to cover the launch of the first mission of an ambitious effort known as Artemis, Apollo’s sister in Greek mythology. The launch was called off yesterday when one of the rocket’s main engines refused to cooperate.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.—The south pole of the moon is a stunning place. Towering mountains are bathed in perpetual sunshine, and the lunar dust, fine as powder, gleams in unfiltered light. Plunging craters exist in permanent shadow and hide pockets of ice in their gray rock, the water frozen and undisturbed for as long as 3 billion years.It is here, somewhere along this silent terrain, that NASA wants to land a new crew of astronauts.

Ah, the sounds of late summer. Pass a pool, and hear the happy yelps of kids splashing around. Sit outside at night, and bask in the soothing buzz of cicadas hidden in the trees. Open the internet, and hear the terrifying howling of outer space.Thank NASA for that last one. The space agency recently shared a clip online of sound coming from a cluster of galaxies about 250 million light-years from Earth.

Now that the world’s most powerful space telescope is finally up and running, we’re in for a constant stream of stunning images of the universe. Just a ton of galaxies everywhere, more detailed than you’ve ever seen them, and too many stars to count—all of it sparkling with an intensity that humankind hasn’t captured before.Not every interesting image from the James Webb Space Telescope is going to be a pretty picture, though.

Astronomy can be, in some ways, a bit like the classic board game Clue. Scientists explore a sprawling but ultimately contained world, collecting pieces of information and testing out theories about a big mystery. You can’t cover every corner, but with the right combination of strategy and luck, you can gather enough clues to make a reasonable guess at the tidy answer—who, where, and how—enclosed in a little yellow envelope at the center of it all.

One question keeps bouncing around my mind as I look at this image from the new James Webb Space Telescope: How is this real? I have followed the story of Webb for years, chronicling the ups and downs and controversies the mission has experienced on its way to becoming a real, functioning telescope. I’ve talked with many dozens of scientists and engineers about how the observatory works and the kind of high-resolution images it is designed to produce.

There are so many galaxies in here.Those bright, spiky points are nearby stars, but every tiny oval, every gleaming blob is a distant galaxy, a swirling creation brimming with stars and dust and planets. Some of the galaxies in the foreground are part of a cluster called SMACS 0723, so massive that its gravity warps the light coming from other, more distant galaxies. The effect magnifies their brightness, bringing thousands of them out of the darkness.

About six months have elapsed since the most powerful space telescope in history bid farewell to Earth and took off into the darkness. In that time, the James Webb Space Telescope has deployed its gold-coated mirrors, turned on its instruments, and gotten the hang of operating 1 million miles from Earth.

About six months have elapsed since the most powerful space telescope in history bid farewell to Earth and took off into the darkness. In that time, the James Webb Space Telescope has deployed its gold-coated mirrors, turned on its instruments, and gotten the hang of operating 1 million miles from Earth.

Lee Feinberg was on vacation, and he deserved it. It was late May, and Feinberg, a manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, had spent “an incredibly tense several months” leading the effort to carefully deploy the mirrors on the world’s newest and most powerful space telescope, making sure that each of the gold-coated tiles—18 in all, arranged in a honeycomb shape—was properly aligned.

UFOs? After years of avoiding any serious discussion of such things, NASA is on it.The space agency announced yesterday that it will form a team dedicated to studying unidentified aerial phenomena “that cannot be identified as aircraft or known natural phenomena.” Starting this fall, the team will examine existing data on these objects and brainstorm new ways to collect future data.

You don’t really hear about Neptune, do you?Not as often as the other planets, certainly. Space robots regularly provide snapshots of the surface of Mars and the clouds of Jupiter. Mercury is a frequent scapegoat for astrology-minded folks having a bad day (even though Mercury being in retrograde is actually just an optical illusion in our night sky). For 13 whole years, the Cassini spacecraft orbited Saturn before plunging into the planet, ending its glorious streak of observations.

You’ve probably heard some version of the line, usually delivered with a sigh. Someone is having a crappy day. Or they’re in a weird mood. Or nothing seems to be going right, despite their best efforts. And they’ve laid the blame on Mercury, the smallest planet in our solar system, nearest to the sun. Everything is Mercury’s fault. The darn thing is in retrograde. And in fact, it’s happening right now.