All SPACE OUT Articles

Spoiler alert: It's an optical illusion.

Watch out, moon! On March 4 at precisely 7:25 am ET, a piece of rocket junk will slam into the moon.

Most people in the United States have lost access to the night sky. This may not be a surprise to you if you’re living in a major metropolitan area. Perhaps you can pick out some of the brightest stars or a few planets on a clear night, but that’s it. Participate in International Dark Sky Week, April 22–30; their mission is to reduce light pollution and bring better lighting to communities around the world so that all life can thrive.

The most distant spacecraft launched by humans, Voyager 1, is currently 155 times farther away from the Sun than the Earth is. That’s almost four times more distant than Pluto, and the Voyager 1 craft has been traveling at over 38,000 mph for over four decades.

Personally speaking, I feel like we’ve been focusing on Mars a little bit too much recently. Sure, the Red Planet is all sorts of awesome – so awesome it may have once been a home for life – but with more than half a dozen orbiters, landers, and rovers, it’s certainly got its due.

Whether it’s less severe than other variants or not, we can all agree that the Omicron variant of the coronavirus is no fun at all. But despite its ominous name, “omicron” is just the 15th letter of the Greek alphabet. In astronomy, the stars in any constellation are ordered from brightest to dimmest, with the brightest getting the name “alpha”, the second brightest “beta”, and so on. And believe it or not, there are some pretty cool omicrons out there.

Keep reading, I'm serious... Yes, there is a certain kind of astronomical object called a “cow” and it’s actually pretty awesome.

Read on to learn about this rare opportunity to name a distant world observed by the James Webb Telescope.

In space, even the smallest explosions are insanely powerful. Take for instance the newly discovered “micronova,” which sounds cute and cuddly and not at all deadly…except for the fact that it’s the explosive equivalent of a nuclear bomb a million times bigger than Mount Everest.

At first, the planet Mercury isn't much to look at. It has a surface only a mother could love, as desolate and empty as the Moon and pock-marked with crater after crater. But this planet has a secret, which has folks wanting to know more.

Sure, the Moon is cool to look at, and fun to think about it. And it literally affects us here on the Earth: without the Moon, we’d be missing half our tides, and likely our planet’s rotation wouldn’t be as stable as it is.

The James Webb Space Telescope is gearing up to be an exoplanet extraordinaire. Among many other missions and targets, astronomers plan to use the observatory, now in its final stages of preparations to study…well, a world where it might rain lava.

Mars is the ultimate off-the-grid experience--far grittier, far harder, and far… redder than even the most remote locations on planet Earth. Let’s break down some of the challenges that people will have to face in order to survive and thrive on our neighbor in the solar system.

We’ve all seen the movies. Tunnels cut through the red rock. Giant glass domes stretching from one end of a crater rim to another. Hydroponics. Lots and lots of hydroponics. But Mars is… a challenge.

We all know we’re not supposed to litter, right? It’s gross and harms the environment. But somebody forgot to tell all the space agencies that have been launching rockets into Earth orbit for well over half a century now – and leaving their space junk all over the place.