
This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here.

This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here.

That was a really close one. Further analysis of a near-miss collision between two satellites in space revealed that they came even closer to one another than initially believed, raising more alarm over the growing danger of space debris.

It’s been a wild and wacky last few weeks in space, not to mention awe-inspiring, as a spectacular total solar eclipse graced the skies across North America. We also said goodbye to a trusty old rocket, while saying hello to what might finally be the first crewed mission of Boeing’s beleaguered Starliner spacecraft.
With bamboo-based products on the rise, we wanted to see how they compared to their plastic and paper counterparts.

Two recent flybys of Jupiter’s moon Io by NASA’s Juno spacecraft revealed a couple of stunning surprises: a remarkably steep mountain and islands in the middle of a burbling lava lake. The new findings were announced yesterday by Scott Bolton, the principal investigator of the Juno mission, at the European Geophysical…
NASA’s experimental solar sail is ready to take flight in Earth orbit, using the pressure of sunlight to test a new way of propulsion through the cosmos.

The International Space Station (ISS) is home to crews of astronauts conducting research in low Earth orbit, but it also hosts a group of mutated bacteria that are thriving under the harsh conditions of space.

NASA is building a compact seismometer for its upcoming Artemis 3 mission to the Moon, hoping to learn more about the internal structure of the dusty satellite from its lunar tremors.

A jawbone found in Somerset, England, may belong to the largest marine reptile yet known, a huge ichthyosaur that lived about 200 million years ago. The new species is dubbed Ichthyotitan severnensis and may have been over 80 feet long, according to the team’s estimates. The finding means that ichthyosaurs could have…