A near term laser ablation of micropellets can be made to rapidly accelerate one ton space probes to reach Pluto in one year. The NASA New Horizons launched in 2006 took 9.5 years to reach Pluto and ...

NASA has announced an updated plan to continue New Horizons’ mission of exploration of the outer solar system. Beginning in fiscal year 2025, New Horizons will focus on gathering unique heliophysics ...

John Casani spent more than half a century turning speculative ideas about distant worlds into working spacecraft that could survive the trip. His quiet influence at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory ...

Parker Solar Probe Makes History by Touching the Sun 8 million miles above the Sun's surface on December 24, 2024, traveling at an incredible 430,000 miles per hour - faster than any human-made object ...

Introduction: NASA's solar system exploration paradigm : the first fifty years and a look at the next fifty / James L. Green and Kristen J. Erickson -- Part I. Overview. Exploring the Solar System : ...

China envisions exploring the solar system, and it seems that would happen soon. The country launched Tianwen-2, an innovative space probe tasked with retrieving samples from an uncharted asteroid and ...

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Science Mission Directorate (SMD) and Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate (ESDMD) have released the final text of the fourth ...

Nearly 70 years after the launch of the first satellite, we still have more questions than answers about space. But a team of Berkeley researchers is on a mission to change this with a proposal to ...

Pt. 1. The golden age, 1957-1982. The beginning -- Of landers and orbiters -- The grandest tour -- Pt. 2. Hiatus and renewal, 1983-1996. The decade of Halley -- The era of flagships -- Faster, cheaper ...

"This has been a decade-long detective story, with each recorded meteorite fall providing a new clue." Ten years ago, astronomers from various institutions, including NASA and SETI (Search for ...