The Lunar Flashlight mission, selected by NASA’s Advanced Exploration Systems, is a project from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center. In the mission, a cubesat would use lasers to look for water ice deep in lunar craters. (Image: © NASA/JPL-Caltech) CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Good things come in small packages: Two…

Video:Channel:Discovery channelsDuration:0:0Description:The term “evolution” usually refers to the biological evolution of living things. But the processes by which planets, stars, galaxies, and the universe form and change over time are also types of “evolution.” In all of these cases there is change over time, although the processes involved are quite different. In the…

(Image: © CfA/Zhong-Zhi Xianyu, Xingang Chen, Avi Loeb) To see if there was a universe before the Big Bang and understand how the cosmos evolved after it began, researchers suggest looking for the influence of particles that acted like clocks.Currently, the prevailing view in cosmology is that in the first few moments of the universe,…

The small-satellite launch company Rocket Lab called off the planned flight of an experimental satellite for the U.S. military Sunday (March 24) due to a video transmitter issue. Rocket Lab was counting down to a 7:36 p.m. EDT (2336 GMT) launch of its Electron booster from Launch Complex 1 on New Zealand’s Māhia Peninsula when the…

THE WOODLANDS, Texas — Less than three months after the New Horizons spacecraft zoomed past a distant, cold space rock, scientists are beginning to piece together the story of how that object, nicknamed Ultima Thule, came to be. In a series of scientific presentations held March 18 at the 50th Lunar and Planetary Science…