A new Sun-observing mission led by ESA and NASA — Solar Orbiter — has returned its first images of the Sun, revealing previously unknown omnipresent miniature solar flares, dubbed 'campfires.' The campfires shown in the image below were captured by the…
The impact of NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission– which aims to nudge the orbit of its target for planetary defense purposes– may produce the first meteor shower from human activities in space, according to research published in The…
Satellite technology has drastically changed how we forecast hurricanes as it has allowed us to track the storm's location, movement, and intensity, from formation to dissipation. On September 8, 1900, a powerful hurricane hit Galveston, Texas, which resulted in…
The eROSITA telescope, which launched in July 2019, has since been scanning the entire sky in X-ray wavelengths, gathering observations for all the deepest all-sky survey. It has now completed its first full sweep, with all the data compiled into a map that contains…
NASA's ICON mission team has released its first batch of observations of the ins and outs of the Earth's ionosphere–the dynamic region high in the planet's atmosphere where terrestrial weather meets space weather. The satellite is designed to study…
A citizen scientist from Europe discovered SOHO's 4 000th comet in the spacecraft's 25-year history. SOHO — Solar and Heliospheric Observatory — jointly operated by NASA and ESA since 1995. The comet was discovered on June 15, 2020, and is currently…
ESA's Solar Orbiter spacecraft passed through the ion tail of Comet C/2019 Y4 (ATLAS) on May 31 and June 1, 2020, and through its dust tail on June 6. This is the 7th space mission to fly through the tail of a comet, and the first one whose upcoming crossing was…
NASA's MAVEN spacecraft has created a map of electric currents around Mars, five years after it entered into its orbit. These currents hold crucial clues in the atmospheric loss that made the red planet incapable of supporting life. "These currents play a…
The European Space Agency (ESA) announced that its Solar Orbiter probe will have a rare encounter with the Comet C/2019 Y4 (ATLAS), passing through the object's ion tail on May 31, 2020 into June 1. Solar Orbiter’s upcoming crossing is the first to be…
Over the past 200 years, Earth's magnetic field has lost around 9% of its strength. Meanwhile, a large region of reduced magnetic intensity has developed between Africa and South America — known as South Atlantic Anomaly. Over the past 5 years, however, a…
