By 1968, America’s space program was on the brink. A launchpad fire at Cape Canaveral killed three astronauts as they were conducting tests in their space capsule in January 1967. After 20 months of congressional hearings, political fallout and a spacecraft redesign, three new ...read more
In 1877, Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli turned his telescope to Mars and saw signs of a potentially lush world. He would publish his observations of what he believed to be “seas” and “continents” on the Martian surface. He also described channels (later found to be an ...read more
History Flashback takes a look at historical “found footage” of all kinds—newsreels, instructional films, even cartoons—to give us a glimpse into how much things have changed, and how much has remained the same.On October 4, 1957, the USSR launched the first satellite into space. ...read more
Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking died on March 14, 2018—also known as Pi Day—at age 76. The scientist stands out for his significant contributions to the field of cosmology, the study of the origin and development of the universe. During his career, Hawking became a cultural ...read more
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
History Reads is a weekly series featuring work from Team History, a group of experts and influencers, exploring history’s most fascinating questions.By January of 1986 America was already bored with spaceflight.It was, in part, NASA’s own fault. The government agency had debuted ...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.WHAT IS SATURNALIA? Saturnalia, the most popular holiday on the ancient ...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 the ...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 purpose. ...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
Becoming the First Man in Space The son of a carpenter, Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin was born in the village of Klushino in Smolensk, Russia in 1934. At 16, he moved to Moscow to apprentice as a foundry man in a metal works, but soon transferred to a technical school in Saratov. ...read more
Through a complex series of equations, Albert Einstein worked out that the acceleration of massive objects should create gravitational waves, or ripples in the fabric of space-time. Such waves propagate across the universe at the speed of light, causing tiny tremors in the atoms ...read more