NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has been quietly working on a way to let students and interested hobbyists build a planet-exploring rover that's a scaled-down version of the American agency's six-wheeled 'droids. For the past few months, JPL eggheads have been toiling away on the project over on GitHub, basing their …

Mars was once covered in hundreds of giant dunes as big as the US Capitol Building billions of years ago, according to new research. A pair of scientists from the University of Washington have discovered more than 300 crescent-shaped structures wedged into the eastern side of Hellas Planitia, an impact crater measuring over 2, …

The US government has published a report detailing how to prepare for the danger of impacts from asteroids that stray too close to Earth in the next ten years. Classified as near-earth objects (NEOs), these are a group of bodies in the Solar System that are less than 1.3 astronomical units – the distance between the Earth and …

Ceres contains more carbon-based compounds - the chemical building blocks for life - than previously thought, according to a new study. Last year, scientists discovered that not only was Ceres’ surface peppered with patches of organic material, but that it is rich in water ice and its crust contains ice, salts and hydrated …

Video Time may be up for America's plucky Opportunity rover that has trundled across the surface of Mars for more than 14 years. During a press conference on Wednesday, NASA officials said that the robot had been caught in a massive dust storm encircling a quarter of the planet, and this had blocked the probe's solar cells from …

A woman has sued NASA, claiming to be the rightful owner of a small vial of moon dust supposedly given to her by Neil Armstrong. The lawsuit was filed under the US District Court of Kansas last week by Laura Murray Cicco. She claims that when she was ten, her mother handed her a glass vial with a rubber stopper containing …

As NASA's Opportunity rover nears its 15th birthday, engineers are worried the plucky little robot may not survive a worsening Martian dust storm. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) spotted the approaching storm on 1 June, giving the Opportunity team notice to kick off their contingency plans. The storm now covers more than …

NASA’s Curiosity rover has again found evidence that Mars was potentially capable of hosting life. As detailed in a new Science paper, “Organic matter preserved in 3-billion-year-old mudstones at Gale crater, Mars”, some of the soil samples Curiosity took from the bottom of Gale Crater turned up molecules of “thiophenes, …

A study published today by the Pew Research Center has found that a majority of Americans reckon that staying on top of the space pile should be a US priority, with NASA still attracting a lot of love. However, party poppers are unlikely to be fired within NASA's scattered spaceflight centres since the idea of putting boots …

While the spaceship name Heart of Gold was taken by the late, great Douglas Adams, NASA has come up with something similar for its forthcoming space telescope. To capture incoming radiation, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope will need to fend off outgoing radiation. The telescope, scheduled to launch in 2020 following several …

The percussive maintenance NASA carried out on the Curiosity Rover's drilling machinery has worked, and the robot has started analysing Martian rock samples again. In mid-May, NASA announced its plan to restart the drill, which had been out of action since a motor failed in October 2016. Agency boffins first tried “Feed …

Video Scientists at NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office have made a rare sighting – an asteroid on a collision course with Earth. The rock, dubbed 2018 LA, was picked up by the Catalina Sky Survey on Saturday morning, just hours before it piled into our home world at a speed of 10 miles per second, or 0.5368 per cent of the …

The Dawn spacecraft orbiting dwarf planet Ceres will soon make its final course change as NASA boffins set it up for a closest-ever flyby yet to get a warts-and-all look. Ceres is the largest body in the Asteroid Belt and orbits between Mars and Jupiter. Dawn's been there since 2015, mapping the surface from hundreds of miles …

Obit The world lost two astronauts this past weekend – one a moonwalker that you've likely heard of, the other a pioneering spacewalker you might not know about. Bye-bye, Alan Bean Alan Bean, the fourth man on the Moon, passed away on 26 May, aged 86. He is perhaps most famous for being the lunar module pilot (LMP) on the Apollo 12 …

A team from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center gathered last week to bid farewell to a mass spectrometer as it began its journey to the red planet via an assembly plant in Italy. The instrument is a key component of a toaster oven-sized lab, called the Mars Organic Molecule Analyzer (MOMA), which will detect evidence of …

The "impossible" EmDrive may be just that, though don't count it out just yet. A group of German physicists at TU Dresden has tested two proposed means of propellantless propulsion – the EmDrive and Mach Effect Thrusters – and found the act of testing is what makes these arguably physics-flouting technologies appear to work. …

Because ride-sharing is caring, SpaceX will send the next batch of Iridium NEXT satellites into orbit along with a pair of NASA gravity monitoring orbiters, GRACE-FO. The launch, scheduled for 1947 UTC (1247 PT) from California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base today, will reuse the outdated Falcon block 4 rocket that flung mystery- …

NASA's top engineers think they've figured out a way to get the Curiosity rover's drill back to work holing the rock faces of Mars. Back in 2016 the nuclear-powered rover's rock-sampling drill broke down after a motor failed. As 225 million km (140 million miles) is too far to make an on-site visit, the men and women of NASA …