NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission teases new insights on how life began

NASA and its partners have published the first wave of information about the samples collected in the OSIRIS-REx mission. "The findings do not show evidence for life itself, but they do suggest t [...]

DNA building blocks on asteroid Ryugu, bacteria that eat plastic waste, and more science news

Remember when Japan sent a spacecraft to an asteroid 180 million miles away to scoop some dirt off the surface? Six years on from its arrival to Earth, that sample has yielded some insights about what [...]

NASA’s Lucy spacecraft is about to have its second close encounter with an asteroid

A NASA spacecraft will make a close approach to an asteroid in the main belt on Sunday afternoon, in the second of several asteroid flybys planned for its 12-year mission to study remnants of the earl [...]

Trump's defunding of NASA would be catastrophic

"This is probably the most uncertain future NASA has faced, maybe since the end of Apollo," Casey Dreier tells me over the phone. Dreier is the chief of space policy at The Planetary Society [...]

NASA will decide how to bring soil samples back from Mars in 2026

NASA will analyze and explore two different landing options for its Mars Sample Return program, though it will take almost two years to do so and is expected to announce its decision in late 2026. The [...]

Train-to-Test scaling explained: How to optimize your end-to-end AI compute budget for inference

The standard guidelines for building large language models (LLMs) optimize only for training costs and ignore inference costs. This poses a challenge for real-world applications that use inference-tim [...]

NASA's DART spacecraft changed a binary asteroid's orbit around the sun, in a first for a human-made object

When NASA crashed a spacecraft into the asteroid moonlet Dimorphos in 2022, it altered both Dimorphos' orbit around its parent asteroid, Didymos, and the two objects' orbit around the sun, a [...]

NASA Says Asteroid Bennu Space Dust Contains Clues to How Life May Have Developed in the Cosmos

The asteroid contains some of the basic ingredients for life. [...]

The first private asteroid mission probe is probably lost in deep space

It was a swing and a miss for the first private attempt at an asteroid mission, but the company is still chalking it up as a win. California startup AstroForge launched a spacecraft dubbed Odin on Feb [...]