Stories by Clara Moskowitz

John Grunsfeld, the former astronaut who now heads NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, thinks that traveling light could get people to Mars by the 2040s

 

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.—After four and a half hours of flying around Earth, the new Orion capsule made a triumphant splashdown in the Pacific Ocean to end its debut mission.

The first human-rated U.S. spacecraft since the space shuttle took an unmanned trial run on Friday
 

Anthropologist Cameron Smith talks about the cultural and genetic implications of long-term space missions

The Orion spacecraft could eventually take astronauts to an asteroid or Mars

Books and recommendations from Scientific American

Orion, designed to carry astronauts into deep space, enters tests this December

A new book and film highlight the story of four brilliant teenagers who try to chase the American dream

Over the summer researchers identified seven specks of dust returned to Earth by the Stardust spacecraft. But determining their true origin has been difficult. Clara Moskowitz reports

Even the lander’s missteps generated valuable data

Stephen Hawking is one of our greatest living geniuses—his insights into the nature of black holes, space and time have truly revolutionized physics.

If dark matter comes in both matter and antimatter varieties, it might accumulate inside dense stars to create black holes
 

Theoretical physicist Nima Arkani-Hamed will present a free live Webcast on the latest insights into the nature of spacetime from the quantum world
 

These particles should not have mass, but they do. By sending neutrinos through the ground from Illinois to Minnesota, physicists hope to learn why
 

The cause of the deadly crash of Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo on Friday remains unknown, but the commercial spaceplane's feathered reentry system looks to have been involved.

In Scalzi’s thriller, Lock In, people can mentally inhabit robotic bodies

We cannot cancel out gravity, but planes nicknamed “vomit comets” can come close
 

Unexplained gamma rays streaming from the galactic center may have been produced by dark matter, but more mundane explanations are also possible
 

Health care emergency management expert Kristin Stevens tells us what went wrong in Dallas, and how we can do better
 

Take part in a citizen-science project by helping researchers track high-energy cosmic rays via a network of smartphone users. Clara Moskowitz reports    

 

If or when we make contact with extraterrestrials, the effect on our religious sensibilities will be profound, says astronomer David Weintraub
 

For the first time two spacecraft will soon make up-close studies of objects from the solar system’s Kuiper Belt, a mysterious region beyond Neptune’s orbit.

Scientific American readers snapped these views of the October 8 total lunar eclipse from the United States and Australia

Nine scientists became new Nobel Laureates this week when the 2014 Nobel Prizes in Chemistry, Physics and Physiology or Medicine were announced.