Space

The "jewel" of our solar system didn't always have its striking rings. Millions of years ago, a likely icy moon orbited Saturn just a little too closely, reaching the planet's so-called Roche limit, the boundary where the planet's gravity pulls a satellite apart. An estimated 17,000 trillion tons of ice likely exploded into Saturn's orbit over just a few days, suddenly creating what today is clearly seen as the planet's stunning rings. Watch this dramatic animated visualization showing how the process might have looked millions of years ago.

The Pillars of Creation, recently photographed by the James Webb Space Telescope, are a gas-and-dust-filled space region 7,000 light years away where young stars are being born in the aftermath of a supernova. Learn why scientists say the formation has been long destroyed.

The Webb team has stationed its mammoth observatory in solar orbit—and brought its instruments below 40 kelvins (minus 233 ºC). Remarkably, most of the cooling has been done passively, by shielding the telescope from the sun and letting physics take care of the rest.

Mercury, the closest planet to our solar system's sun, has an orbit of roughly 88 Earth days, and is not the hottest planet in the solar system (that title goes to Venus and its dense atmosphere). From Mercury's surface, the light of the sun appears 11 times brighter than from Earth, and the Sun itself would appear three times as large. Since Pluto's demotion to dwarf planet, Mercury now claims the smallest planet moniker, coming in only slightly larger than Earth's moon. Explore NASA's official page on Mercury here.

Don’t let the name fool you: A black hole is anything but empty space. Rather, it is a great amount of matter packed into a very small area - think of a star ten times more massive than the Sun squeezed into a sphere approximately the diameter of New York City.

Is space destined to be the next Wild West? Since the 1960s, United Nations members have worked together to create a framework of treaties, agreements and accords that set the rules for space exploration. Because space law is made up of several different agreements, it can be difficult to understand exactly how it works. In this video, a legal scholar outlines the evolution of space law from the space race era to current commercial space flight missions.

SpaceX has developed several lines of rockets, from its workhorse Falcon 9 to the visionary Super Heavy rocket of the company's Starship designed for massive payloads. Each iteration costs millions of dollars and came with scientific and economic challenges and several are no longer in development. Learn more about the company's roster of rockets and craft here.

It's estimated that for every dollar NASA spends on its programs, $8 is produced in US economic growth. With a 2023 budget of roughly $25 billion, that means NASA helped create $200 billion in economic value. The administration's investments pay off so massively due to the technologies it develops, many of which become commercially appealing. Dive into the economic impact of NASA's development here.

In their pioneering work to develop the technologies necessary for humans to inhabit space, NASA and its counterpart agencies around the world have produced dozens of products millions of people use everyday. Some of these are obvious, like water filtration systems and wireless headsets, while many are surprising, like artificial limbs and insulin pumps. Dive into the list here.

One of the often neglected aspects of the space industry is its thousands of metric tons of waste, all just stuck in orbit around Earth. Each object, even tiny ones, pose threats to functioning craft, necessitating a change in approach before orbit fills up with too much trash. Enter the skyhook, a long-theorized launch device effectively catapulting objects into space via a cable. One scientist proposes utilizing space debris as the fulcrum of this skyhook as a more efficient launch method that also preserves outdated space objects for posterity.