NASA is launching a spacecraft destined to slam into an asteroid as part of its Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission tonight, from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Its purpose ...

As much as we love Star Trek, we have to admit there are some continuity problems. For example, in Spock’s Brain, the alien-of-the-week’s ion drive gave Scotty engineering envy. However, in The ...

Ion thrusters are an amazing spacecraft propulsion technology, providing very high efficiency with relatively little fuel. Yet getting one to produce more thrust than that required to lift a sheet of ...

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It sounds like the equivalent of taking your car out of gear, sitting in the back seat and trying to get it to move forward by throwing a tennis ball (at relativistic velocities) at the dashboard. The ...

The European Space Agency probe SMART-1 has returned its first pictures of the Moon's surface. "This image is the first proof that the camera is working well in lunar orbit," says Jean-Luc Josset of ...