Space | featured news

A private company launched a spacecraft into orbit Wednesday in a bold demonstration test for NASA that could lead to the first commercial space station supply run next year and eventual astronaut rides.

A Japanese probe reached Venus on Tuesday and prepared to enter orbit on a two-year mission that would mark a major milestone for Japan's space program and could shed light on the climate of Earth's mysterious neighbor....

The atmosphere of a relatively nearby extrasolar planet - just three times bigger than Earth - has been measured in a pioneering experiment.

A camera on the plane's wing captured dramatic images as it flew back down through the earth's atmosphere.

Scientists discovered two bubbles of energy erupting from the center of the Milky Way galaxy.

Jupiter and Mars aren't the only recent impact victims in our solar system. In two talks today at the Division for Planetary Sciences in Pasadena, California, astronomers report that a small asteroid located in the inner asteroid belt between those two planets took a major hit early last year.

Discovery of a "Goldilocks" planet smack in the middle of the "habitable zone" of the nearby star, Gliese 581 is the news of the day. This is certainly newsworthy result. Finding a rocky, Earthlike, planet in the habitable zone is a major milestone.

Hang onto your luggage, Boeing wants to fly you into space -- at least into low-Earth orbit. The aerospace company and a Virginia company have reached a preliminary agreement to sell seats on Boeing commercial crew spacecraft to individuals, companies, nongovernmental organizations, and U.S. federal agencies, Boeing said in a news release.

A small asteroid passed within the moon's distance from the Earth on Wednesday morning, and another will do likewise later in the day, space watchers say.

Thirty-four years after NASA's Viking missions to Mars sent back results interpreted to mean there was no organic material - and consequently no life - on the planet, new research has concluded that organic material was found after all.