Meghan Bartels

The test photo includes more than 200,000 stars.

The rocket will also carry a Dutch radio antenna designed to catch faint celestial signals from the early days of the universe.

Other comments during his town hall touched on how discrimination will fare in his agency, the risks of human spaceflight and the fate of the agency's next major telescope.

"We see a distinctive pattern of the wet land areas of the world getting wetter...and the dry areas in between getting dryer."

Terrestrial life is intimately influenced by the tilt of Earth's axis, so it shouldn't surprise us if the same is true elsewhere.

By 2050, the report estimates, there will be about 5.6 billion air conditioners worldwide, in contrast to 1.6 billion in use now.

Between 1985 and 2015, hit songs were significantly more danceable than songs that didn't top the charts.

Where do they come from? How do they work? And of course, will they help us find aliens?

Researchers believe the Roman Empire was economically stronger—and dirtier—than the much-lauded republic that inspired the founders of the U.S.

Europa Clipper is scheduled to leave for the moon in the 2020s.

It contains about 10 times as much stuff as scientists had previously realized, it just happens to be perfectly aligned with Earth so that we see it edge-on.

"This event is the largest one so far conducted by North Korea, and it's created meters of deformation."

The birds are carefully adapted to the absentee parenting lifestyle.

The lava lake at Kilauea's summit has been receding and that has scientists worried.

The object is more than 200 times farther away from its stars than Earth is from the sun.

Satellite imagery is helping scientists track fissures and gas emissions during the eruption.

In order to identify what 2004 EW95 was made of, the team studied the light reflected off of it.

"Dust" is a bit of a misnomer: Moon dust is essentially tiny particles of glassy rock formed when things crash into the lunar surface and briefly melt the rocky crust.

Chances are, there are plenty more examples of the phenomenon lurking elsewhere in the solar system.

Hawaii's civil defense service said 26 homes had been destroyed by the eruption as of Sunday evening.

The launch window opens at 7:05 a.m. Eastern time.

"It's been 30 years of frustration and 10 years of getting ready to go to Mars."

Kilauea has technically been erupting since 1983 but has recently become much more active.

It's a dog-eat-dog world out there, even for plants.

The mission ended in 2003, but a bunch of its data had never been studied closely.

"When you're pulling the crust apart and you're pumping it full of magma, you'd expect that it would probably fail on shorter timescales."

The tiny planet is built kind of like a peanut M&M.

A magnetic field reversal is not the sort of thing we necessarily want to live through firsthand, though the phenomenon remains a mystery.

So far, every single NASA mission destined for another planet has launched from Florida.

"[Dead zones] are a disaster waiting to happen."