All Stories

Be a part of the Perseverance landing with these six ways of celebrating the rover's mission!

The 50th anniversary of the Apollo 14 mission, which included the longest moonwalk without a rover, is a good time to show how traverses away from the lunar landers progressed from one mission to the next.

A new global inventory of landforms created by water on Mars confirms they are more common than previously reported. Many of these landforms formed late in Mars’ history, which tells us that the timeframe that Mars may have been habitable for life lasted longer than we previously thought.

On January 28, 1986, Space Shuttle Challenger was set to launch on STS-51-L, on a mission to observe and track Halley’s Comet—73 seconds after launch, the shuttle disintegrated, ending the lives of all seven crew members. The disaster was most heavily felt in the space community and even in the realm of the cultural arts. Particularly, famed science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke and astronaut Sally K. Ride had their own respective responses to this tragedy.

Seventy-three seconds after launch, Challenger was destroyed on live TV. We did not understand what we saw: Our teachers could not explain it, our parents were unlikely to have better answers, and few of us probably spent time paying attention to what transpired afterwards in terms of the official investigation. The Challenger disaster symbolizes a moment in our personal and shared memories when we felt great sorrow together.

After the 1950s, fictional depictions of space travel needed to suggest conceivable ways to cross interstellar distances to seem plausible. Some authors suggested faster-than-light drives, hyper drives, jump drives, worm holes, and black holes.

The search for life is a pillar of Mars exploration. But our search isn’t only confined to the planets of our solar system. Radio telescopes search for signals of intelligent life from far away planets, orbiting other stars. In his story, “The Great Silence,” science fiction author Ted Chiang features the Arecibo telescope as he considers the significance of the animal life that surrounds it.

Based on my research, which include image composites of two flyby views of Mercury from the MESSENGER spacecraft, I conclude that Mercury has not cooled and shrunken as much as previously thought.

Satellites from NASA and private companies are making headlines. What’s their history and how might their future affect space and life here on Earth?

Astronautical engineer and astronomer George Robert Carruthers, a name well-known and dearly regarded in the space science community, and a good friend of the National Air and Space Museum, passed away on Saturday, December 26 after a long illness.