Fifty years after astronauts bounced around the lunar surface in a stripped-down electric cart, General Motors is back with a rover that’s more like a reliable pickup truck than a one-time toy. The Lunar Terrain Vehicle, or LTV, is developed by a team led by Lunar Outpost, with General Motors handling the battery pack, frame and smarts for standing upright on uneven ground. This vehicle is for NASA’s Artemis missions which will deliver humans to the South Pole starting around 2030.
A spiral galaxy in the Scorpius constellation, 100 million light-years away, is a beauty to say the least. NASA/ESA’s Hubble Space Telescope captured images of NGC 6000, which has a golden core and blue arms, providing a glimpse into stellar evolution, supernovae, as well as an unexpected visitor from our own Solar System.
Sagittarius B2, a giant cloud of gas and dust near the center of the Milky Way, is churning out stars at an incredible rate. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has trained its infrared eye on this star factory and has captured images that are both breathtaking and baffling. This region, just a few hundred light-years from the galaxy’s central black hole, Sagittarius A*, holds secrets about how stars are born that Webb’s advanced technology can only partly reveal.
A thousand light-years away, in the constellation Perseus, a cosmic nursery is humming with life. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory have imaged IC 348, a star-forming region in our Milky Way, and it’s a beautiful picture of galactic creation.
NGC 2775, located 67 million light-years away in the constellation Cancer, is a cosmic riddle that defies categorization. Astronomers have historically classed galaxies as spirals (with twisting arms of stars and gas) or ellipticals (smooth and featureless, like cosmic eggs). This galaxy, in a spectacular new image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, is neither.
Jeff Bezos made headlines this week, not with a huge statement about lunar bases or orbiting hotels, but with a short video clip from Blue Origin’s latest New Shepard flight, captured by a camera that detached and drifted with the rocket. He puts it simply: two wide-angle lenses stitched together to form a complete circle of view.
M82, also known as the Cigar Galaxy, is 12 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope snapped this image in stunning detail, resembling a cosmic smoldering cigar with a heart spewing out stars at warp speed.
Space travel has always been a long haul since chemical rockets, the space age’s workhorses, guzzle fuel and plod through the universe, making a trip to Mars a year long slog. But a team at Ohio State University is breaking the rules with a new concept: a nuclear powered rocket that could cut the travel time in half. Their Centrifugal Nuclear Thermal Rocket, or CNTR, replaces solid fuel rods with liquid uranium, and that’s a big increase in efficiency that makes Mars feel like a weekend getaway.
In July 2024, NASA’s Perseverance rover drilled into a reddish arrowhead shaped rock in Jezero Crater on Mars, which was once a big lake. Cheyava Falls, named after a Grand Canyon waterfall, has everyone in a tizzy. Its surface is covered in what the scientists call “leopard spots” and “poppy seeds” and might just have ancient microbial life hidden inside.
Hubble’s latest image shows a star cluster 160,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small galaxy that orbits our own Milky Way, shining quietly. LMC N44C, part of the N11 star-forming region, is more than just another picture of the universe; it’s a snapshot of the mechanics of star formation itself, and it’s so clear it feels tactile. Bright blue stars shine through smoky gas clouds, illuminating clumps of dust that look like cosmic sculptures.