Articles tagged as Outer Space | Smithsonian Magazine

Pictures? No problem. But don’t expect much information. A crew tends to the X-37B after it landed at Vandenberg Air Force Base in October 2014, after 674 days in orbit.

What’s the Secretive X-37 Spaceplane Doing Up There?

The Air Force isn’t saying, so we asked other spaceplane experts

January 20, 2016

Swirling magnetic waves triggered spectacular explosions on the sun’s surface

January 19, 2016

Half of NASA's astronaut class of 2013 are women.

Cool Finds

Half of NASA’s Newest Astronaut Class Are Women

38 years after NASA hired its first female astronauts, four women are training to go to Mars

January 18, 2016

An artist's rendition of Juno in orbit around Jupiter. The craft is powered entirely by the sun's rays.

Armed with over 18,000 solar cells, the Jupiter orbiter is taking solar-fueled space exploration to new lengths

January 15, 2016

An illustration shows the record-breaking supernova ASASSN-15lh as it would appear from an exoplanet about 10,000 light-years away.

Think Big

Astronomers Have Found the Brightest Supernova Yet

The powerful blast is so weird that it could be a whole new kind of star explosion

January 14, 2016

Cool Finds

Star Light, Star Bright, Here’s Why the Heavens Look Brighter Tonight

It’s not just because the air is clearer

January 14, 2016

An artist's impression of Philae's landing on Comet 67P. Philae is the small craft beneath the Rosetta orbiter. It detached from Rosetta and landed on the comet on November 12, 2014. Now it may be out of contact forever.

As Comet 67P hurtles further and further away, it’s taking the ‘little lander that could’ along with it

January 11, 2016

Adam Steltzner celebrates the successful landing of the Curiosity rover on Mars on August 5, 2012.

What Landing a Rover on Mars Teaches You About Leadership and Teamwork

In his new book, NASA engineer Adam Steltzner shares his insights on how to inspire people to make the impossible possible

January 11, 2016

A meteorite discovered in the Australian ouback on New Year's Eve.

Cool Finds

4.5 Billion-Year-Old Meteorite Found in the Australian Desert

This 3.7 pound rock could help scientists learn about Earth’s origins

January 8, 2016

What goes into a black hole never comes out. Or does it?

New Research

Stephen Hawking Thinks We Can Solve a Major Black Hole Mystery With Hair

No toupees needed, though. The “hairs” in question are minute changes in spacetime at the fringes of black holes

January 8, 2016

Does Icy Pluto Have a Hidden Ocean? New Horizons Offers New Clues

Data from the NASA probe are helping to build a solid case for a liquid ocean inside the tiny, distant world

January 7, 2016

The Postal Service honors NASA’s New Horizons Mission and Star Trek’s premiere

January 4, 2016

A copy of a photograph of a solar eclipse taken by the English astronomer Arthur Eddington in 1919.

Cool Finds

Long-Lost Photos of Eclipses and Stars Found in an Observatory Basement

The stash of old negatives includes a 97-year-old copy of the photo that helped confirm the Theory of Relativity

December 31, 2015

The "Dog Star" Sirius is the brightest star in the night sky.

The star Sirius is high in the sky, and comet Catalina is at its brightest

December 31, 2015

A Soyuz TMA-17M spacecraft lifts off from a launch pad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome on July 23, 2015.

Russia’s federal space agency will soon be no more

December 28, 2015

Screenshot from “The story of space debris” showing the Earth's cluttered space in 2015.

Cool Finds

Jettison Through Nearly 60 Years of Space Junk Accumulation

People have been leaving a mess out in Earth’s orbit

December 28, 2015

New Research

China’s Lunar Rover Discovered a New Kind of Moon Rock

The Yutu Rover has discovered a type of basalt unlike anything else ever found on the moon

December 24, 2015

Astronomers have discovered strange chemicals in interstellar objects like the Horsehead Nebula.

Cool Finds

Scientists Are Searching for Space Chemicals That Could Never Exist on Earth

Bizarre chemicals in deep space could help explain the origins of life

December 22, 2015

Darth Vader could have saved a few dollars by building it around an asteroid

December 17, 2015

People in 45 countries submitted ideas for naming exoplanets and their host stars after legends and literature

December 16, 2015