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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

The puzzling story of a mysterious malfunction 250 miles above Earth

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.

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.

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.”

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.

On Saturday, June 23, 2018, a team of experts from Botswana, South Africa, Finland and the United States of America recovered a fresh meteorite in Botswana´s Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR). The meteorite is one of the fragments of asteroid 2018 LA which collided with Earth on June 2, 2018 and turned into a meteor fireball that detonated over Botswana a few seconds after entering the atmosphere. The incident was witnessed by a number of spectators in Botswana and neighbouring countries and was captured on numerous security cameras.

Scientists have found 12 new moons orbiting around Jupiter, in a breakthrough discovery about our mysterious neighbour. They include an object that scientists have referred to as an “oddball”. It is just one kilometre in size, and is flying in the opposite direction to many of the planet’s moons – and behaves in an entirely different way to any of the other 78 objects orbiting the planet. As such, it might be responsible for having smashed up many of the other objects that make up the moons around Jupiter.

The knuckle-biting story of the first lunar landing from the people who were there.

The Moon hangs above us like a dusty old rock, devoid of life, pock-marked by craters. As static and unchanging as it seems to us now, the Moon may have looked quite different four billion years ago, in its earliest years, according to a new study that suggests the surface may have held life.

If you missed the glorious display from a blood red moon and radiant Mars during the weekend's early morning eclipse, there's another opportunity to get a good glimpse of the red planet tonight – Mars will be the closest to Earth it's been in the last 15 years. Unlike the eclipse, (which was more lengthy than usual but still a tough one to catch if you're usually in bed at 5.30am on a Saturday), this planetary performance can be enjoyed over the course of several hours tonight – and in the next few nights too.

Will the next wave of Silicon Valley innovations be space-driven? Panelists at the recent International Space Station R&D conference think so.

Mission success would open the door to the third flight of a Falcon 9 rocket.

Mars is kind of a bummer: That place is a hotbed of dynamic dust storms that got so big in recent months that they encircled the entire planet. Those conditions, sure to be a challenge for future Mars colonies, are a buzzkill for NASA’s Opportunity Rover right now: A dust storm forced the droid, which has been roaming Mars for 14 years, to shut down in June, and it’s still turned off today.

We all might be anxiously awaiting the eventual launch of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope — which has been stuck in an endless series of delays thanks to the idiots at Northrop Grumman — but the trusty Hubble is still delivering some pretty fantastic views of the heavens. The telescope’s latest snapshot is a real doozy, and it’s going to make you feel like you barely even exist.

For the past three months, Mars has been in the midst of a global dust storm, depriving the red planet almost entirely of sunlight. That's been particularly challenging for the heavenly body's resident robot, the solar-powered Opportunity rover, and his commanding engineers back here on Earth. But this week, the skies have become much clearer, with the Sun's light finally reaching the planet's surface. Unfortunately, it seems the skies are still not bright enough for the rover to wake.

Two years after launching from Florida, a NASA spacecraft is closing in on an ancient asteroid, Bennu, for a sample of space dust that could reveal clues to the start of life in the solar system. The spacecraft, OSIRIS-REx, has even snapped its first, blurry pic of the cosmic body, which is about the size of a small mountain, about 500 yards (meters) in diameter.

NASA and the University of Texas have teamed up to digitize 19,000 hours of recordings from the Apollo 11 mission that landed the first two people on the moon. The audio was uploaded to the Internet Archive, a nonprofit website that hosts digitized versions of cultural artifacts. “One of the things that comes across is that each of the people working for NASA is proud of what they do. They were always working collaboratively,” John Hansen, a speech researcher at the university and principal investigator for the project, told NBC News.

Swiss ‘Pac-Man’ eats tiny satellites, not pills.

NASA's Juno probe is now less than one year away from its rendezvous with Jupiter. Juno, which launched in August 2011, is scheduled to slip into orbit around the gas giant on July 4, 2016.