Space

On the morning of January 28, 1986, a nation of viewers gave a collective gasp. Space Shuttle Challenger, the crown jewel of NASA’s ambitious shuttle program, had just exploded, leaving a telltale trail behind as it disintegrated into thin air. The disaster prompted an outpouring ...read more

By January of 1986 America was already bored with spaceflight. It was, in part, NASA’s own fault. The government agency had debuted the space shuttle program five years earlier with an aggressive public-relations message that the reusable vehicles would make access to space both ...read more

Saturnalia, held in mid-December, is an ancient Roman pagan festival honoring the agricultural god Saturn. Saturnalia celebrations are the source of many of the traditions we now associate with Christmas. Watch Ancient History documentaries on HISTORY Vault What Is Saturnalia? ...read more

A team of scientists just announced a blockbuster discovery: a potentially habitable exoplanet about the Earth’s size, orbiting a dim dwarf star just 11 light years away. The newly named exoplanet is named Ross 128 b, after the red dwarf star it orbits, Ross 128. So far, it is ...read more

On October 4, 1957, Sputnik I made history as the first satellite to successfully launch into space. But it also marked another milestone: The beginning of space trash. Space trash or junk is basically any man-made object that exists in space but no longer serves a useful ...read more

Solar eclipses have been fascinating—and often terrifying—humans throughout the course of history. For the first time in nearly 100 years, a solar eclipse’s path of totality, where the entire sun is obscured by the moon, will cross a wide swath of the United States on August 21, ...read more

Solar and lunar eclipses—astronomical events that occur when the Earth, the Sun and the Moon are aligned—have figured prominently in human history. Striking to behold, eclipses often were viewed as supernatural phenomena. They also allowed ancient civilizations to develop ...read more

According to data picked up by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), the two black holes that smashed together some 3 billion light-years from here were large in themselves, measuring 19 and 32 times the mass of the sun. But when they merged, they ...read more

Though astronomers have long known that other stars in the Milky Way galaxy have planets orbiting them, they weren’t actually able to see such exoplanets until just a couple of decades ago. Now they have confirmed the existence of more than 3,400, according to the latest ...read more

1. John Glenn was a star before joining the Mercury program. Glenn had fallen in love with flying at an early age, building model airplanes while growing up in Ohio. In 1941, Glenn discovered a U.S. Department of Commerce program looking for students to train as pilots. Just six ...read more

Project Blue isn’t your traditional space mission. Unlike the wide-ranging, long-running projects NASA is known for (think Hubble, Kepler and the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope), the collaborative science consortium has a far more specific focus and objective: to build and ...read more

For much of history, comets were thought to be divine omens, atmospheric anomalies or celestial wanderers that flashed through the solar system before vanishing into interstellar space. All that started to change in 1705, when the English astronomer Edmond Halley published his ...read more

In 1859, the French scientist Urbain-Jean-Joseph Le Verrier went to work on one of the most puzzling problems in astronomy: Mercury’s orbit. For years, astronomers had noted that the solar system’s smallest planet seemed to follow a peculiar course as it circled the sun. In ...read more

It’s being called one of the biggest astronomical discoveries of the century: a potentially habitable Earth-like planet is orbiting the closest neighbor to our sun, a red dwarf star known as Proxima Centauri. Scientists with the European Southern Observatory (ESO) confirmed the ...read more

Percival Lowell knew something else was out there. Based on his calculations, the American businessman and astronomer was convinced that an unknown ninth planet was responsible for the wobbling orbits of Uranus and Neptune. For more than a decade until his death in 1916, Lowell ...read more

In the late 1950s, research branches of the U.S. military began monitoring solar activity and space weather, the disturbances in Earth’s magnetic field and upper atmosphere that can interfere with radio transmissions, power lines and other technologies. By the ‘60s, a special ...read more

Though it had long been believed that planets existed outside our solar system, astronomers did not confirm their presence until 1992, when at least two were found to be circling a pulsating radio star, or pulsar. Since then, more than 3,000 additional exoplanets have been ...read more

The fifth planet from the sun, Jupiter is over 300 times more massive than Earth and over twice as massive as every other planet in the solar system combined. NASA first sent a probe there in 1973, when Pioneer 10 obtained close-up images and took measurements of its massive ...read more