The US Senate on Wednesday cleared the way for Jim Bridenstine, a Republican Congress member from Oklahoma, to become the next administrator of NASA. The post has remained vacant since January 2017, when Charles Bolden, the space agency’s leader under President Obama, stepped down. If Bridenstine is approved in the final Senate vote expected this week, he’ll bring some odd qualifications to the job, and likely some controversy.

NASA has never been led by an inexperienced politician, but Senate Republicans have nevertheless rallied behind Trump's dubious choice.

Rep. James Bridenstine’s nomination is already controversial. Evidence of self-dealing won’t help matters. By Nick Schwellenbach, Adam Zagorin.

There’s a great world next door. Let’s go. The search for alien worlds and perhaps alien life will take another step outward this week when TESS, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, is launched into orbit around the Earth. TESS will spend at least two years scrutinizing the entire sky for exoplanets — planets around other stars — within about 300 light years from here. The worlds next door.

See what scientists saw this week at a meeting in Vienna. It’s a 3-D fly-around of Jupiter’s north pole, showing its central cyclone and the 8 smaller cyclones encircling it.

The Exploration Upper Stage seems nowhere near readiness.

No, no, no...That is not a massive NASA cloud generating machine in that viral video. Here is the actual science.

Sperm is objectively pretty strange here on Earth, so imagine how it looks and acts in microgravity. A NASA scientist tells Inverse that’s exactly what astronauts on board the International Space Station (ISS) will be doing over the next few months.

Outer space glows with a bright fog of X-ray light, coming from everywhere at once. But peer carefully into that fog, and faint, regular blips become visible. These are millisecond pulsars, city-sized neutron stars rotating incredibly quickly, and firing X-rays into the universe with more regularity than even the most precise atomic clocks. And NASA wants to use them to navigate probes and crewed ships through deep space.

Before there were computers and software that could stitch together digital images, they were printed on photo paper, trimmed by hand, and taped in place on a large black board.

If you saw a white substance streaming away from your airplane's wing after takeoff, what would you do? Figure it's just a weird air thing and ignore it? Keep an eye on it? Or would you rely on your background as a NASA aerospace engineer, where safety is an everyday issue, and realize it was time to flag down the flight attendant? NASA aerospace engineer Rumaasha Maasha made choice No. 3 on a flight out of Huntsville, Ala., and that's why he's being praised for quick action in a bad situation.

NASA has just green-lighted a research project to investigate how swarms of robotic bees might spread out over the surface of Mars, equipping our exploration efforts with a much wider net.

NASA’s aeronautical innovators are ready to take things supersonic, but with a quiet twist.

Clean rooms are the final line of defense in extraterrestrial exploration: Spacecraft departing for other worlds are stripped of any biological contaminants there, and samples returning from space, such as the Apollo moon rocks, are stored in pristine conditions to be studied later. But a new study suggests that a clean room storing meteorite samples at NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, Texas, may not be quite so clean, after all.

Seven percent of Scott Kelly's genes did not return to normal when he got home.

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope currently is undergoing final integration and test phases that will require more time to ensure a successful mission. After an independent assessment of remaining tasks for the highly complex space observatory, Webb’s previously revised 2019 launch window now is targeted for approximately May 2020.

You don’t have to know a whole lot about science to know that black holes normally suck things in, not spew things out. But NASA detected something mighty bizarre at the supermassive black hole Markarian 335. Two of NASA’s space telescopes, including the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), amazingly observed a black hole’s corona “launched” away from the supermassive black hole.

NASA is pressing forward on plans to build a Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway, an outpost for astronauts positioned in the space near Earth's moon. According to NASA, the Gateway will not only be a place to live, learn and work around the moon but will also support an array of missions to the lunar surface. And scientists foresee a host of uses for the station.

More than 100 million pieces of orbital debris are circling our planet. NASA has a strategy to cope on the rare occasion when the space junk falls to earth. @Enterprisenxt

Former American astronaut Scott Kelly says he was a poor student until he found inspiration in Tom Wolfe’s famous book “The Right Stuff” that he read at the age of 18 while pursuing bachelor’s degree in science from the State University of New York Maritime College in the Bronx. According to Scott, this book, which was about America’s early space programs, inspired him to work hard in his studies and to also excel in his career as a NASA astronaut.

The International Space Station has hosted more than 230 astronauts over the years, and now it’s set to host its first floating robotic head. A ball-shaped robot known as CIMON — that’s short for Crew Interactive Mobile Companion — will join German astronaut Alex Gerst when he and his crewmates rocket to the ISS this June. Roughly the size of a medicine ball and weighing about 11 pounds, CIMON is designed to accompany and assist Gerst and his crewmates as they move about the ISS.

Scores of stories reporting that Kelly’s DNA is substantially different now are missing some basic facts about how biology works.

A new photo shows a swirling maelstrom on Jupiter through rose-colored glasses.

The thrusters aboard the Voyager 1 spacecraft just did what we thought was impossible. After 37 years of inactivity, NASA just received response from spacecraft 13 billion miles away, NASA said in a statement on its website. Voyager 1 is NASA’s farthest and fastest spacecraft. It was launched on September 5, 1977. Having operated for 40 years, 6 months and 14 days as of March 19, 2018, the spacecraft relies on small devices called thrusters to orient itself so it can communicate with Earth.

Breaking Voyager 1’s record

The new SpaceX rocket seriously undercuts its competitors.

Remember NASA's Deep Space Gateway? The proposed miniature space station in lunar orbit that will serve as a training ground for deep space, and a waypoint for surface missions? Our next big step for the human exploration of the solar system? The project I wrote a big piece on last year, titled NASA unveiled new plans for getting humans to Mars, and hardly anyone noticed?

NASA's Parker Solar Probe mission will launch in summer 2018 to travel closer to the Sun than any spacecraft before it, facing brutal heat and radiation conditions. And you can send your name along for the ride.

The suits might have caused the physical changes more than space did

Spending a year in space not only changes your outlook, it transforms your genes. Preliminary results from NASA's Twins Study reveal that 7% of astronaut Scott Kelly's genes did not return to normal after his return to Earth two years ago. The study looks at what happened to Kelly before, during and after he spent one year aboard the International Space Station through an extensive comparison with his identical twin, Mark, who remained on Earth.

President Trump is asking NASA to put a 'footprint' in outer space in a way the agency hasn't in 45 years.

Nasa has found an entire solar system with as many planets as our own. The discovery of a new planet around the Kepler-90 star, which looks like our own sun, means the distant solar system has a total of eight known planets. And those planets look like those in our own neighbourhood: rocky planets orbit close to the star, with gas giants further away.

The image was captured by NASA's Landsat 8 satellite.

It's been called the "most mysterious star in the universe," bigger than the sun and yet brightening and dimming in an odd way that suggested to some an alien megastructure might be circling it. But a study out Wednesday, compiled by more than 100 scientists who have been observing the star named KIC 8462852, puts the alien rumors to rest.

John Young, NASA's longest-serving astronaut, who walked on the moon and flew on the first Gemini and space shuttle missions, has died. He was 87.