Space, Nasa | featured news

Using NASA's Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope, scientists were able to detect the light of the earliest stars, which are now long since gone... One of the primary goals of the Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope is to measure the starlight in the universe and use that to figure out how much light has ever shone in it. Yesterday, astronomers on Fermi’s research team announced that they have reached that goal.

A space capsule has returned to Earth, ending the first commercially contracted re-supply mission to the International Space Station (ISS). The capsule was sent by the California-based company SpaceX, the first of 12 missions it will perform for US space agency Nasa... SpaceX says it is just a few years away from being able to provide an astronaut "taxi" service.

For years, astronomers have known about the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, but these pictures from NASA's NuSTAR telescope show a rare view of the usually sleeping giant gobbling down a cosmic snack.

The surface of Saturn's huge moon Titan has the consistency of soft, wet sand with a fragile crust on top, a new analysis of a nearly eight-year-old space probe landing suggests.

Ooh, shiny! NASA's Curiosity rover has spotted something curious on the Martian soil, likely "a shred of plastic" from the rover, says the space agency. Still, NASA is taking a hard look at the mystery object.

You know that scene in the film Contact where the “Machine” is spooling up, its three spinning rings kicking out crazy light and an electromagnetic field powerful enough to pitch nearby Navy battleships sideways, as Ellie (Jodie Foster) waits, terrified, in her tiny spherical craft above the space-time bedlam, to plummet into the vortex?

The NASA rover Curiosity has beamed back pictures of bedrock that suggest a fast-moving stream, possibly waist-deep, once flowed on Mars -- a find that the mission's chief scientist called exciting.

Getting a six-wheeled car-size rover safely onto the surface of the red planet? Daunting, sure. But NASA did it with Curiosity. Sending humans on a mission to Mars? That requires overcoming even more outlandish obstacles.

David's time on Earth had come to a temporary end — and he was taking his family with him. As soon as the rover Curiosity dropped onto the Martian surface on Aug. 5, David and hundreds of his fellow scientists and engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory switched from Earth time to Mars time.

NASA's Curiosity rover is making global headlines as it travels uncharted territory on Mars, and it will venture into new realms back on Earth this week when it premieres a new will.i.am song. The Black Eyed Peas rapper's tune "Reach For The Stars" will be broadcast live from the surface of Mars, via Curiosity, at 1 p.m. PST (4 p.m. EDT/2000 GMT) on Tuesday to a news conference at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, the organization said in a statement on Monday.