On the morning of October 12, if all goes according to plan, NASA will send a high-tech spacecraft called Psyche on a 2.2 billion-mile journey to an intriguing asteroid of the same name. Well, to be clear, the asteroid is known as 16 Psyche. The goal of the Psyche mission is to study this space… Read More »
China’s lunar mission to bring back the first samples ever collected from the Moon’s far side is scheduled for next year, officials say, as Beijing steps up its ambitious plan to send astronauts to the Moon this decade and build an international research station lunar. Preparations for the next planned mission, known as Chang’e-6, are… Read More »
A team of three researchers has won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics for work that revolutionized the way scientists study the electron by illuminating molecules with flashes of light lasting attoseconds. But how long does an actosecond last, and what can these infinitesimal pulses tell researchers about the nature of matter? I first learned… Read More »
As it hurtled through space on its seven-year mission to investigate the sun, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe may have finally picked up signals of the culprit behind Venus’ mysterious “lightning” storms. The discovery came in 2021, when Parker performed a routine flyby of the windy world in an attempt to harness the planet’s gravitational pull… Read More »
The use of tiny microphones on NASA’s Perseverance Rover on Mars it has proven to be incredibly beneficial for both engineers and scientists. The sensors can identify wind gusts and even hear the crackling sounds of laser pulses produced by the rover’s instruments. Likewise, the swirling blades of the Ingenuity The helicopter on Mars was… Read More »
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft will be able to continue exploring its exotic surroundings for at least another five years. The agency announced Friday (September 29) that it will keep New Horizons’ lights on while it is still hurtling through the Kuiper Belt, the vast ring of icy bodies beyond Neptune’s orbit. “The New Horizons mission… Read More »
Meteorites – fragments of rock that have fallen to Earth from space in the form of extraordinarily fiery meteors – have been the subject of public fascination, amazement, myth and even religious worship for thousands of years. In recent decades they have become a cosmic Rosetta stone for scientists investigating the birth of our solar… Read More »
STOCKHOLM (AP) — Three scientists won the Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for giving us our first split-second glimpse into the superfast world of spinning electrons, a field that could one day lead to better electronic or disease diagnoses. The prize went to the French-Swedish physicist Anne L’Huillier, the French scientist Pierre Agostini and the… Read More »
On April 8, 1911, Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes scribbled an almost incomprehensible note in pencil on a kitchen notebook: “pretty close to nothing.” The note referred to the electrical resistance he had measured during a seminal experiment that would later be credited with the discovery of superconductivity. But first, he and his team would… Read More »
Editor’s Note: Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advances, and more. The 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to a team of scientists who created an innovative technique using lasers to understand extremely rapid movements of electrons that were previously thought impossible… Read More »
