All Stories

On March 16, 1966, the Gemini VIII astronauts made the world’s first space docking, quickly followed by the first life-threatening, in-flight emergency in the short history of the U.S. human spaceflight program.

It seems like every time there’s big news from outer space, it’s that we found water some place—as traces of ice or wisps of vapor, embedded in rocks or bound up in dry-as-dirt-regolith. Today, Matt, Nick, and Emily explore how we search for wet spots in the solar system, what they can tell us about our home planet, and why they’re the key to making our way in the universe.

I’m an executive producer at Smithsonian Channel and I had the pleasure of making the documentary Making Tracks on Mars. We made our film feel like an adventure because most people think of Mars as a frontier, but at its core, the story taps into our primal drive to explore.

To get the answer, we have to know what to look for and where to go on the planet for evidence of past life. With the Perseverance rover set to land on Mars on February 18, we are finally in a position to know.

In 1897 author H.G. Wells imagined a different way to see Mars in his short shorty, “The Crystal Egg." Writing around the same time as his famous novel, “War of the Worlds,” he introduces us to two humans who discover a mysterious egg-shaped crystal that allows them to view the surface of Mars – and the strange creatures that inhabit it.

The Apollo program should be remembered as much for landing the first humans on the Moon as it is for countless demonstrations of problem solving and ingenuity, of continual fine-tuning and honing of expertise, which enabled NASA to set even more ambitious goals with each successive mission.

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 disintegrated 73 seconds after launch. The disaster was felt in the space community.