The northern lights are fleeting and fantastical. But Elise Wright Knutsen, an atmospheric physicist at the University of Oslo, has gotten used to them. “I’m Norwegian, so the aurora is a big thing here,” she said. “You kind of grow up with it happening over your head.” But catching her first glimpse of the aurora…
Don Pettit, NASA’s oldest active astronaut, returned to Earth on April 20, the day he turned 70 years old. That concluded his fourth trip to space — a busy 220 days at the International Space Station. Like other crew members on the space station, Mr. Pettit conducted experiments, talked with students and exercised for hours…
Under President Trump’s proposed budget, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration would largely become the National Moon and Mars Administration, with an almost singular focus on getting astronauts to those two destinations. The Trump administration proposes a budget of $18.8 billion for NASA, down 24 percent from $24.8 billion in the current budget year. The…
An office in an obscure corner of the federal government that NASA has relied on to safely land astronauts on the moon and robotic probes on Mars is facing pressure to cut its tight-knit team of experts by at least 20 percent, according to two people familiar with the mandate. The thinning of the staff…
The broadcast journalist Gayle King and the singer Katy Perry were set to make a brief trip into space on Monday on a flight operated by Jeff Bezos’ private company, Blue Origin. It would be the first time an all-female crew has been to space since 1963. Their flight, on Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket,…
NASA will prioritize sending American astronauts to Mars, President Trump’s nominee to lead the space agency will tell a Senate committee on Wednesday. The nominee is Jared Isaacman, the chief executive of the payment processing company Shift4 Payments, who is a close associate of Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX. As someone who has led…
After a stay aboard the International Space Station that unexpectedly stretched to nine and a half months, the NASA astronaut Suni Williams is back to doing something she enjoys on Earth. “I actually went out and ran three miles yesterday,” Ms. Williams, who returned to Earth two weeks ago, said on Monday during a news…
The vermilion, amethyst and jade ribbons of the northern and southern lights are some of Earth’s most distinctive features. But our planet doesn’t have a monopoly on auroras. Scientists have spied them throughout the solar system, weaving through the skies of Mars, Saturn, Jupiter and even on some of Jupiter’s fiery and icy moons. Lights…
Within the Trump administration’s Defense Department, Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocketry is being trumpeted as the nifty new way the Pentagon could move military cargo rapidly around the globe. In the Commerce Department, SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet service will now be fully eligible for the federal government’s $42 billion rural broadband push, after being largely shut…
NASA made a bet a few years ago that commercial companies could take scientific experiments to the moon on a lower budget than the agency could. Last year, that was a bad bet. The first NASA-financed spacecraft missed the moon entirely. The second landed but fell over. But this month, a robotic lander named Blue…