The shimmery towers of cosmic dust and gas at the heart of the Eagle Nebula have inspired awe for decades since they were first captured by the Hubble telescope.
For more than 30 years, NASA’s iconic Hubble Space Telescope has been scouring the cosmos to look for ancient galaxies and dazzling nebulae. The wear and tear of traveling through low Earth orbit is starting to show on the aging telescope, forcing it to resort to using only one of its three remaining gyroscopes to…
NASA is preparing to send astronauts on a spacewalk to repair a telescope mounted on the exterior of the International Space Station (ISS). The repair involves installing patches to eliminate unwanted sunlight leaking into the instrument.
Nine years and 3.2 billion pixels later, it is complete: the LSST Camera stands as the largest digital camera ever built for astronomy and will serve as the centerpiece of the Vera Rubin Observatory, poised to begin its exploration of the southern skies.
It might be the end of the road for two of NASA’s most iconic telescopes as the space agency looks to reduce the funding for the Hubble Space Telescope and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, much to the dismay of scientists who rely heavily on the cosmic observations of the missions.
The month is off to a running start when it comes to space, with a fresh crew launched to the International Space Station, some new astronomical insights, and the promise of a third SpaceX Starship test flight. Click through for the week’s coolest space imagery.
NASA still has plenty of cool projects afoot in the real world—did you hear about that asteroid-redirecting test?
Last month, astronomers focused the Webb Space Telescope on the galaxy MRG-M0138 and found something surprising: a supernova in the ancient universe, magnified for your viewing pleasure by the gravitational lensed galaxy.
The Einstein Probe, an X-ray telescope managed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, will be ready to launch next month. The probe will look for transient events in X-ray light and try to answer some fundamental questions about black holes and gravitational waves.