Space & Physics

NASA’s nuclear Mars mission, the Iran war’s carbon fallout, the looming climate cost of rebuilding and a hopeful new Lyme vaccine

NASA is targeting April 1 to launch a crew of four astronauts on a journey around the moon that will set the tone for the agency’s lunar exploration ambitions

This familiar phenomenon has puzzled researchers for centuries, but experiments are finally making sense of its unruly behaviors

Superprecise timekeepers based on atomic nuclei could be tested as soon as this year

During their 10-day mission, this four-person crew will swing around the far side of the moon—and potentially travel farther from Earth than anyone in history

Decades of data have suggested the universe is flat, much like an infinite plane. But a new analysis reveals deep flaws in that simple conclusion

In 2017 NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope zoomed in on a comet as it passed around the sun. And then things took a more unusual turn

Long ago, the cosmos might have been a black hole factory—and these primordial objects are even weirder than you think

NASA’s Swift space telescope is doomed to burn up in Earth’s atmosphere later this year. A daring mission to boost it to safety could have big implications for science

New images captured by the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes show Saturn in both visible and infrared light

Climate scientist Kate Marvel talked to Scientific American about her decision to leave NASA amid federal government turmoil and funding challenges

A major defense against everything space throws at us, Earth’s magnetic field may even protect the moon from damaging galactic cosmic rays