If you thought NASA was playing the long game with its plan to put people on Mars in the 2030s, you haven't seen anything yet. New Scientist has learned that a team at the administration's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has started planning a mission tha...
NASA hopes to send a probe to Alpha Centauri in 2069
If you thought NASA was playing the long game with its plan to put people on Mars in the 2030s, you haven't seen anything yet. New Scientist has learned that a team at the administration's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has started planning a mission tha...
The European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope is getting an upgrade. ESO signed an agreement with Breakthrough Initiatives, a program created to search for extraterrestrial intelligence, to modify its infrared instrument called VISIR (VLT...
NASA is helping Stephen Hawking and Russian venture capitalist Yuri Milner with the monumental task of getting a tiny probe to Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system to Earth. Project Starshot aims to propel a lightweight silicon "StarChip" to one-f...
It used to be that if NASA didn't want to do something, it didn't get done, but we're a long way from those days. The agency doesn't believe that there's currently enough value in sending a probe to seek out new life forms and new civilizations in Al...
The Tesla Model S is one of the highest-rated electric cars ever, and it just got even better. This week the automaker rolled out an upgrade that gives the vehicle a bigger battery, a refreshed exterior and a "bioweapon defense mode." Meanwhile, the...
The concept of exploring other star systems with probes (and not just telescopes) has proven elusive for one good reason: even the fastest spacecraft would take 30,000 years just to reach Alpha Centauri, our closest neighboring star. However, invest...