NASA is launching a spacecraft destined to slam into an asteroid as part of its Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission tonight, from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Its purpose: to test whether we’re capable of deflecting a killer asteroid before it strikes Earth.

But before it meets its final destination, NASA is using the spacecraft to test out brand new ion drive technology — and it’s straight out of a science fiction movie.

The space agency’s Evolutionary Xenon Thruster-Commercial (NEXT-C) uses the spacecraft’s solar power to create an electrical field. This field then accelerates a xenon propellant to speeds of up to 90,000 mph, harnessing the resulting stream of “thousands of ion jets” as propulsion.

Astronauts on the International Space Station shared a festive message for people on Earth as they prepare to spend the holidays in orbit.

Expedition 66 crew members, including NASA astronauts Raja Chari, Thomas Marshburn, Kayla Barron, and Mark Vande Hei, ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer, and Roscosmos cosmonauts Anton Shkaplerov and Pyotr Dubrov, will be celebrating Christmas aboard the orbiting lab this year. The crew shared a special holiday message on Twitter, explaining what Christmas means to each of them and reflecting on childhood memories spent with family.

(July ‘21)

A wobble in the moon’s orbit will raise high tides even higher, exacerbating the devastating effects of sea-level rise.

Comet Leonard streaks across the field of view of the SoloHI telescope aboard ESA/NASA’s Solar Orbiter spacecraft on Dec. 17–19, 2021. The comet’s apparent backward movement is due to the spacecraft’s relative motion.

Credits: ESA/NASA/NRL/SoloHI/Guillermo Stenborg

The James Webb Space Telescope, NASA’s premier observatory of the next decade, successfully launched to space Saturday morning. The telescope will study exoplanets in new ways and look deeper into the universe than we’ve ever been able to before.

The long awaited space telescope is just days from launch, but it’s dozens of steps, and millions of miles, away from doing science.

Eminent physicist John Wheeler says he has only enough time left to work on one idea: that human consciousness shapes not only the present but the past as well.

A method for estimating the source properties of gravitational-wave events shows a speed-up of six orders of magnitude over established approaches. This is a promising tool for follow-up observations of electromagnetic counterparts.