In a new paper published in the journal Nature, an international team of researchers have shared that there may be a super-Earth orbiting Barnard's Star, a very-low-mass red dwarf star that is only six light years away from regular Earth. The astronomers didn't exactly see the planet, but they do have the data to back up what they believe is out there.

A major problem with Mars missions: Bringing enough fuel for a return journey. In a striking new first-person account in IEEE Spectrum, NASA team lead Kurt Leucht writes about how the space agency is hard at work on a potential solution he hopes will let future Mars missions — or even colonists — extract rocket fuel from Martian soil.

In early September, the island nation of Japan was doing Japan things. One day, Typhoon Jebi roared ashore near Osaka and Kobe, breaking historical wind records. Early the next morning in Tokyo, as thick clouds from Jebi’s outer bands raced overhead, an offshore earthquake rattled softly but perceptibly through the city. The capital city’s skies remained a bleak gray a few hours later as we entered the headquarters of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in the city’s bustling Shinagawa area.

Europe and Russia's ExoMars rover has been assigned its destination on the Red Planet. The robot explorer will almost certainly land on Oxia Planum -- a site rich in iron-magnesium clays near the equator -- say scientists from the Landing Site Selection Working Group (LSSWG) in Leicester, UK. They've been discussing touchdown options for around four years and -- with the blessings of the European and Russian space agencies...

NASA has certified SpaceX’s Falcon 9 (likely F9 v1.2) to launch the space agency’s most valuable and critical scientific spacecraft, opening up the floor for SpaceX to routinely compete for missions comparable to Hubble Space Telescope, the Curiosity Mars rover (Mars Science Laboratory), Cassini (a Saturn orbiter), and James Webb Space Telescope, among many others.

Scientists know a lot about Mars, at least when it comes to what it looks like. Sound, on the other hand, is a lot more challenging, and it’s not like we have high-powered microphones listening to the wind sweep across the Martian plains. Now, researchers from Anglia Ruskin University and the University of Exeter have created an interesting piece of music that wasn’t just inspired by Mars, but was actually composed by a computer algorithm using a Mars sunrise as data.

After suffering a couple technical glitches that have put NASA's Curiosity rover off its duties on Mars this year, the robotic explorer seems to be back in full health, having driven to a new site and drilled a sampling hole, according to NASA statements. That hole is its 18th successful drilling assignment, according to NASA. It targeted a type of rock geologists with the mission have been eyeing for more than a month, but failed to successfully drill at a previous site. The drill was out of commission between late 2016 and this May as engineers addressed a problem with the instrument.

One of the International Space Station’s computers has malfunctioned, Russia’s space agency has announced. Roscosmos said one of three computers in the station’s Russian module has failed. It said Russian flight controllers plan to reboot it on Thursday ahead of the arrival of a spaceship called Progress later this month.

The year is 2038. After 18 months living and working on the surface of Mars, a crew of six explorers boards a deep-space transport rocket and leaves for Earth. No humans are staying behind, but work goes on without them: Autonomous robots will keep running a mining and chemical-synthesis plant they’d started years before this first crewed mission ever set foot on the planet. The plant produces water, oxygen, and rocket fuel using local resources, and it will methodically build up all the necessary supplies for the next Mars mission, set to arrive in another two years.

NASA’s Kepler spacecraft has once again entered a safe mode as the aging spacecraft appears to be running out of fuel. In a brief statement Oct. 23, NASA said that, during a routine communications session on Oct. 19, controllers found that the spacecraft had entered a “no-fuel-use sleep mode” that disrupted operations. “The Kepler team is currently assessing the cause and evaluating possible next steps,” the agency stated.

NASA's Parker Solar Probe, which launched earlier this year, has set a new record for becoming the closest human-made object to the Sun, the US space agency announced Monday.

'Halloween Asteroid' shaped like a skull is late for the party this year, flying past Earth on 11 November.

Russia will stop shipping U.S. astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) in April 2019, Russian station Kommersant FM 93.6 has reported. Deputy Prime Minister Yury Borisov reportedly said the return flight of a Soyuz-MS next year "will finalize the fulfillment of our obligation under a contract with NASA." With new crew-carrying vehicles still under development, the move may leave the U.S. unable to send astronauts to the ISS.

A British nuclear start-up company is developing a nuclear fusion rocket engine as a step towards revolutionising space travel. The UK company Applied Fusion Systems are currently filing a patent for a new nuclear fusion rocket engine, creating by turning a small fusion reactor into a rocket. This technology could be used to run from a compact nuclear fusion reactor, a development which could pave the way for high speed, interstellar space travel.

Mystery continues to swirl around a hole found in the outside of the International Space Station. Last week, Nasa and the Russian space agency scrambled to fix a leak in the floating laboratory that was causing air to slowly rush out of the space station. The crew on board eventually plugged up the gap with epoxy, fixing the problem at least temporarily.

The weird hexagon swirling around Saturn's north pole is much taller than scientists had thought, a new study suggests. Researchers have generally regarded the 20,000-mile-wide (32,000 kilometers) hexagon — a jet stream composed of air moving at about 200 mph (320 km/h) — as a lower-atmosphere phenomenon, restricted to the clouds of Saturn's troposphere.

New research suggests rocks from outer space could provide a proxy for studying the neutrinos generated in the explosion that occurs when a massive star dies. Let us sympathize, for a moment, with neutrino researchers. These tireless folks devote their energies toward understanding subatomic particles that, it would appear, want nothing to do with them.

If you know your way around a chemistry lab, you could help humanity set up shop on Mars — and make some serious cash in the process. NASA is challenging people throughout the United States to come up with a new and efficient way to convert carbon dioxide into glucose, a simple sugar. CO2 dominates the thin atmosphere of Mars, and energy-rich glucose is a great fuel for microbe-milking "bioreactors" that could manufacture a variety of items for future settlers of the Red Planet, NASA officials said.

Unwilling to go quietly into that good night, the Kepler Space Telescope is once again gathering scientific data—despite a malfunctioning thruster and painfully low levels of fuel. With the $600 million Kepler Space Telescope high atop our dead pool lists, this brief report published yesterday by NASA comes as a rather pleasant and unexpected surprise...

A new long-term study using data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft has revealed a surprising feature emerging at Saturn's northern pole as it nears summertime: a warming, high-altitude vortex with a hexagonal shape, akin to the famous hexagon seen deeper down in Saturn's clouds. The finding, published Sept. 3 in Nature Communications, is intriguing, because it suggests that the lower-altitude hexagon may influence what happens above, and that it could be a towering structure hundreds of miles in height.

The puzzling story of a mysterious malfunction 250 miles above Earth

According to two recently deleted job postings on the internet, where nothing can ever really be deleted, Amazon Web Services is hiring technical engineers to develop cloud services for satellites and “space-based systems.” TJI Research spotted the listings, which called for a software engineer and product manager to “to help innovate and disrupt the launch, satellite and space world with new AWS products, services and features,” according to one of the job ads, for “a new AWS service that will have a historic impact.”

The moon may soon get its first tourist — and first human visitor in more than four decades. SpaceX announced Thursday that it's booked the world's first private passenger to the moon. Elon Musk's space technology company said on Twitter the unnamed traveler would board its BFR (or Big Falcon Rocket) to the moon, where only 24 people have ever traveled. Only 12 of those people actually walked on the moon, and they were all Americans.

A space observatory at the centre of swirling alien conspiracy theories has asked for “patience” as it continues to be locked down. The Sunspot Solar Observatory in Sunspot, New Mexico caught the attention of the world when it was shut down by FBI agents who reportedly swooped on the facility after arriving in elite Blackhawk helicopters. It led immediately to suggestions the advanced technology inside of the facility spotted something it shouldn’t – such as proof of extraterrestrials, UFOs or even some baseless speculation that the observatory had spotted that the sun has started dying.

Everyone's talking about the Moon. It'll be 50 years this Christmas since Apollo 8 first flew to the Moon – with the crew taking the famous Earthrise photos – and we're close to the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11's first moon landing and moonwalk for Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. Can we go back? Should we go back? NASA knows we probably have to go back, if only to use the Moon as an off-Earth stepping stone to enable deeper solar system exploration missions, so it's spent years trying to create a nuclear reactor that can be operated there.

It's going to be a big night for space tourism. The private spaceflight company SpaceX will reveal its first passenger for a trip around the moon on the company's massive BFR rocket and you can watch it all live online. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has even dropped tantalizing previews of the BFR's new rocket design on Twitter.

NASA’s TESS spacecraft — that stands for Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, in case you had somehow forgotten — is an incredibly powerful tool for spotting distant worlds. It was launched back in April, but it took some time to get the satellite up to speed and begin working on actual science objectives. Now, in a demonstration of its power, NASA is showing off the first science image the satellite has captured, and boy is it a beauty. The image is absolutely packed with stars, taking a half hour to soak in the light and produce the collection of pictures you see below.

Today, it’s Tesla Roadsters; tomorrow, space lasers? SpaceX’s president and CEO says the firm would consider launching weapons into orbit for the U.S. government, if asked. “If it’s for the defense of this country, yes, I think we would,” Gwynne Shotwell said, in response to a question about SpaceX’s willingness to launch “offensive weapons” into space for the United States. She made her remarks at the Air Force Association’s annual conference. The crowd broke into applause.

NASA’s new focus has been made clear: the space agency is sending humans back to the Moon — this time, in a sustainable way. At least, that’s the claim made by NASA’s administrator Jim Bridenstine, who says he’s not interested in just leaving “flags and footprints” on the lunar surface. “This time when we go, we’re going to go to stay,” he said at a meeting with NASA advisers in August.

The Long March 9 rocket would be on par with the Saturn V booster.

Anders. Borman. Lovell. The names of the first three humans to journey around the moon will echo throughout eternity. But these brave Apollo 8 astronauts were actually not the first earthlings to complete the voyage. Two tortoises beat NASA to the moon by a matter of months. Fifty years ago today, on September 18, 1968, the Soviet Union’s Zond 5 spacecraft circled the moon, ferrying the first living creatures known to have orbited another world. On board were two Russian steppe tortoises along with some worms, flies and seeds.

It's still unclear exactly what's ailing NASA's Curiosity Mars rover, but mission team members are optimistic they can get the six-wheeled robot up and running again. Since last Saturday night (Sept. 15), Curiosity has had trouble beaming home to Earth certain science and engineering data stored in its memory. Curiosity has stood down from all science operations while the mission team investigates the problem.

Researchers have confirmed the existence of a SECOND Earth located in the Proxima Centauri System. The planet is believed to have oceans just like Earth and may host alien life. In the past, thousands of exoplanets have been discovered in the universe, but none of them is like Proxima B. Proxima b, as has been baptized, has very ‘promising characteristics’: it is probably rocky, slightly more massive than our own planet and is located in the region around its star that would allow liquid water on its surface to exist.

Kepler has been running low on fuel for some time, so much so that NASA even put the spacecraft into a sleep mode in July in order to make sure it had enough fuel to transmit data back to Earth. But the planet-hunter has kept chugging -- it even kicked off a new data collection campaign in August. However, Kepler has run into another snag, and NASA has decided to put it back to sleep for the time being.

In early August, Boeing's Leanne Caret and SpaceX's Gwynne Shotwell took the stage at Johnson Space Center to announce the first astronauts who will fly on their commercial crew spacecraft. It was a significant moment to see two of the most powerful women in aerospace alongside one another—two fierce competitors coming together for the good of the country.