NASA is standing down from its Artemis I mission to the moon next week, as a tropical storm off the coast of South America creeps toward Florida and the agency’s launch site for the Space Launch System rocket. The US space agency said it will decide on Sunday whether to roll the rocket and spacecraft back from the launch pad to its primary hangar, the Vehicle Assembly Building....

It’s a pretty safe bet that nobody is going to fill the solar system with soup, out to the orbit of Jupiter. For one thing, that would take a lot of soup—2 x 10 to the 39th power liters, which is also 10 to the 42nd power calories worth, or more energy than the sun has put out in its entire lifetime. So a soupy solar system is not likely to happen anytime soon. That fact, however,...

It was 2,300 years ago that the ancient Chinese poet Qu Yuan wrote the poem “Tianwen,” or “Heavenly Questions.” It is only now that China’s Tianwen spacecraft have begun flying missions designed to come up with some heavenly answers. And as Space.com reports, those missions are becoming increasingly ambitious. In 2020, the Tianwen 1 spacecraft was launched to Mars,...

Dimorphos is easily one of the least interesting objects in the solar system. It’s a rock—a moonlet, really—measuring just 160 m (525 ft.) across, orbiting the asteroid Didymos, which itself measures only 780 m (2,560 ft). Located 11 million km (6.8 million mi.) from Earth, the Didymos-Dimorphos system is just one tiny part of the river of rubble that circles the sun in the...

Puppies aren’t born barking, just as children aren’t born chattering. They learn their voice, and then they learn to use it—partially from others, partially from the effect the behavior has. With the litter of eleven mixed-breed puppies that I observed from birth, I first heard a bark come out of a puppy mouth at three weeks. It was the suggestion of a bark, an evocation of a...

When it comes to global warming, methane is a monster. It may represent only 11% of the share of greenhouse gasses emitted each year, but during its first 20 years in the atmosphere it is 80 times more efficient at capturing heat than the far more commonplace carbon dioxide. That’s why it’s so important to spot the worst emitters and shut them down—or at least reduce their...

Climate change likely juiced rainfall by up to 50% late last month in two southern Pakistan provinces, but global warming wasn’t the biggest cause of the country’s catastrophic flooding that has killed more than 1,500 people, a new scientific analysis finds. Pakistan’s overall vulnerability, including people living in harm’s way, is the chief factor in the disaster that...

It’s one of our great cosmic misfortunes that we entirely missed Mars’ golden age. About 3.5 billion years ago—during the first billion or so years of the solar system’s existence—the Red Planet was a blue planet, awash in ocean, seas, and rivers the way Earth is today. Ancient sedimentary basins, deltas and riverbeds are all that is left of Mars’ watery...

(GENEVA, Switzerland) — With weather disasters costing $200 million a day and irreversible climate catastrophe looming, the world is “heading in the wrong direction,” the United Nations says in a new report that pulls together the latest science on climate change. The World Meteorological Organization, in the latest stark warning about global warming, said weather-related...

When the International Space Station (ISS) goes out of service in 2030, low-Earth orbit won’t be empty of cosmic labs. Already flying—if only partially constructed—is China’s two-module (soon to be three) Tiangong space station. Compared to the 16-module ISS, China’s orbiting platforms is a modest machine, but as Popular Science reports in a story that nicely frames...

For the past 23 days, the Space Launch System (SLS) moon rocket has been more monument than machine, standing 32-stories tall on launch pad 39B at the Kennedy Space Center, the most conspicuous object for miles around as it towers over the flat Florida landscape. On Aug. 29 and again on Sept. 3, the rocket was supposed to take off on an uncrewed mission around the moon—kicking off...

People are becoming increasingly worried about how they’ll be impacted when rising seas swallow up coastal properties. For starters, there are the homeowners who live on the threatened land. And then there are the mortgage lenders and home insurers who have a financial stake in those properties. But indirectly, anyone who relies on public education, fire departments, and other municipal...

Humans prefer their weather in something of a Goldilocks zone—a not-too-hot, not-too-cold temperature window which not only affects our physical comfort, but also our mood. During heat waves or deep freezes, tempers fray, patience wears thin, and behavior can suffer. Now, a new study in The Lancet Planetary Health, has found that this holds true not only in our in-person interactions, but...

NASA's just-launched Space Launch System—its mega moon rocket—is a remarkable machine with a long, complicated history

For the second time this week, NASA called off the launch of Artemis I on Saturday morning due to technical issues. The launch was originally planned for Aug. 29, but will now need to be rescheduled again due to a fuel leak. Saturday’s launch was canceled when rocket operators sent a command to fill the rocket’s tank, and an alarm went off that there was a hydrogen leak. The launch...

There’s nothing terribly special about the exoplanet known as HIP 65426 b. It’s a gas giant nine times the mass of Jupiter, orbiting its host star 385 light years from Earth. Just one of at least 5,000 exoplanets astronomers have detected, it could easily go overlooked. But, as NASA announced yesterday, HIP 65426 b is all at once very big news—becoming the first exoplanet...

While green tea has a long-standing reputation for health benefits, research has been much more mixed on black tea. One problem, says Maki Inoue-Choi, an epidemiologist at the National Cancer Institute, is that large observational studies on tea and mortality have focused on countries like Japan or China—places where green tea is more popular. To fill this gap, Inoue-Choi and her...

Zombie ice from the massive Greenland ice sheet will eventually raise global sea level by at least 10 inches (27 centimeters) on its own, according to a study released Monday. Zombie or doomed ice is ice that is still attached to thicker areas of ice, but is no longer getting fed by those larger glaciers. That’s because the parent glaciers are getting less replenishing snow. Meanwhile the...

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — A fuel leak and then an engine problem during final liftoff preparations led NASA to scrub the launch of its mighty new moon rocket Monday morning on a shakedown flight with three test dummies aboard. The next launch attempt will not take place until Friday at the earliest. As precious minutes ticked away, NASA repeatedly stopped and started the fueling of the Space...

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — A fuel leak interrupted NASA’s launch countdown for its new moon rocket early Monday, reappearing in the same place that saw seepage during a dress rehearsal back in the spring. Launch controllers halted the tanking operation, which already was running an hour late because of thunderstorms offshore. They slowly resumed the process to confirm that it was,...

At some point things were destined to settle down in the glassed-in mission control room at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Md. For much of this year, the Institute has been the center of the astronomical world. After all, it is there that each image captured by the new James Webb Space Telescope first arrives, including the dazzling batch received and released in...

The U.S. might be celebrating the impending launch of the Space Launch System (SLS) moon rocket and the serial successes of the James Webb Space Telescope, but according to at least some experts, there’s a potential skunk at the cosmic picnic: China. As Defense One reports, a new analysis conducted by experts from the Space Force, Air Force, Defense Innovation Unit, and more have concluded...

Our universe contains about 200 billion galaxies. These galaxies are not uniformly distributed – under the pull of gravity, they lump into clusters, and the clusters form superclusters. Between these clusters, galaxies align along thin threads, the “galactic filaments”, which can be several hundred million light-years long. Galactic clusters and filaments are surrounded by...