Spacecraft

The possibility of the asteroid 2024 YR4 impacting our planet might not be ruled out until 2028, raising the prospect we’ll need to prepare for the worst

Material retrieved from the asteroid Bennu by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft shows that all the basic building blocks of life were astonishingly widespread in the early solar system

From space weather to science missions, there’s a lot to be excited about in heliophysics this year.

Peculiar bursts of energy called chorus waves have been detected in deep space far from our planet, suggesting they could pose problems for long-distance space travel

We discuss a big week for commercial spaceflight, a red dye ban and a scary spider species in this news roundup.

A little-known chapter of the Hubble Space Telescope’s history is a reminder of the risks of looking at the sun

The heavy-lift New Glenn rocket soared to success, reaching orbit on its highly anticipated inaugural flight but failing to land its booster on an ocean barge

A Texas-built lander named Blue Ghost marks another test of NASA’s new lunar delivery initiative

NASA sees two paths for saving its beleaguered plan to retrieve materials from the Red Planet but won’t choose between them until 2026

The Parker Solar Probe will swoop just 6.1 million kilometers above the sun’s surface on Christmas Eve. Scientists are thrilled at what we might learn

See the year’s most striking images from the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes, NASA’s Mars rover and the best sky watching on offer

For two decades now, the iconic twin Voyager spacecraft have been quietly overturning everything we thought we knew about the boundary between our solar system and interstellar space