technical updates

The first dedicated mission to another star will launch before the end of the decade, if all goes according to plan. A nonprofit called the Fermi Explorer Mission announced today (Sept. 1) that it plans to send a small probe toward Alpha Centauri by 2029. But none of us will live to see the interstellar spacecraft 's historic arrival; its journey is expected to take about 80,000 years. "We hope to be both the first to leave and the last to arrive at Alpha Centauri," Philip Johnston, co-founder and president of the Fermi Explorer Mission, said in a statement today. "None of us will be here when this journey ends, and that is the point. It's about taking the first achievable step and inspiring future generations to keep pushing beyond the limits we inherited." Artist's impression of the planned Fermi Explorer Mission spacecraft, which is targeted to launch toward Al...

At the turn of the century, sci-fi evolved to new heights, which fortunately had nothing to do with Y2K (even if previous sci-fi movies might have led us to believe it would). Propelling themselves through the 00s, iconic franchises continued to thrive with both Star Wars and Star Trek continuing their dominion over sci-fi cinema. The decade also saw the birth of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) with 2008's Iron Man. The MCU now consists of 38 movies and counting, with many of them sitting firmly in the sci-fi genre. It wasn't all legacy franchises, though; our list is chock-full of original stories that joined the upper echelons of sci-fi history. In fact, it was such a fantastic decade for science fiction flicks that we've had to extend our "best of" list to 12 entries, because we simply could not narrow it down to ten. So, let's all meet up in the year 2000 (to 2...

Growing up, the best Saturday morning cartoons were the ones we re-enacted with our friends on the playground. Whether it was screaming at the top of our lungs to go Super Saiyan like in Dragon Ball Z, or sleuthing around the school as Darkwing Duck. In the years since our childhood, we’ve often bonded with both strangers and friends over memories of Saturday morning cartoons, remembering the quaint stories and characters that influenced our lives in surprisingly profound ways. Those stories have a unifying power, and that’s at the heart of developer Shapefarm’s debut, Orbitals, which seeks to combine that rich heart with the gameplay style of Hazelight Studios’ co-op games like It Takes Two and Split Fiction. Will Orbitals be looked back on quite as fondly as those cartoons years down the road? Probably not, but this Switch 2 exclusive is a no-frills co-op smorgasbord that’s delightful from star...

Two astronauts will conduct history's sixth all-female spacewalk today (Sept. 1), and you can watch it live. NASA's Jessica Meir and Sophie Adenot of the European Space Agency will venture outside the International Space Station (ISS) at around 8:30 a.m. EDT (1230 GMT) on an excursion expected to last about 6.5 hours. You can watch it here at Space.com, courtesy of NASA, or directly via the agency . Coverage will start at 7:00 a.m. EDT (1100 GMT). NASA astronaut Jessica Meir and the European Space Agency's Sophie Adenot work together inside the International Space Station’s Quest airlock during spacesuit fit and leak checks. (Image credit: NASA) During today's spacewalk , Meir and Adenot "will replace a retroreflector on the forward port of the space station's Harmony module to support spacecraft navigation during rendezvous and docking operations," NASA officials ...

NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory is back to studying the universe after spending months in a low-drag configuration while awaiting an orbital rescue mission that ultimately fell short. Mission controllers restarted two of Swift's three science instruments — its X-ray Telescope (XRT) and Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope (UVOT) — on Aug. 26. Both instruments had been shut down in February as part of an effort to minimize atmospheric drag and keep the aging spacecraft in orbit long enough for another spacecraft to reach and boost it to a higher altitude, according to an Aug. 28 statement from NASA. Swift's third instrument, the Burst Alert Telescope (BAT), remains offline. Operations of the BAT were halted in April to conserve power, allowing controllers to position Swift's solar panels in a way that further reduced drag from its interaction with Earth's atmosphere . NASA say...

The SpaceX Falcon Heavy carrying NASA's Roman Space Telescope crosses the face o the sun as it launches to space from Pad 39A of the Kennedy Space Center in Florida in this photo taken by Space.com's Josh Dinner from a Titusville Hobby Lobby parking lot. Here's how he did it. (Image credit: Space.com / Josh Dinner) CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Standing in the parking lot of the Titusville Hobby Lobby was maybe something I should have planned on before traveling to Florida for the launch of NASA's Nancy Roman Grace Space Telescope, but it was not where I expected to be until I was speeding there in my car. Rocket enthusiasts and locals around Florida's Space Coast gathered Sunday morning (Aug. 30) to watch SpaceX's latest Falcon Heavy launch. The triple-booster rocket launched NASA's newest flagship observatory , the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is now on its way...