Astronomy

The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft's first close-up observations of asteroid Bennu reveal new details that pose a challenge to the mission's objective of returning a sample to Earth.

UA students will get hands-on spacecraft hardware development experience thanks to NASA’s CubeSat Launch Initiative, which recently selected CatSat to fly as auxiliary payload aboard future space missions.

Incoming assistant professor Jessica Barnes will have the opportunity to study a previously unopened sample of a moon rock that was collected in the early 1970s during NASA's Apollo 17 mission.

The SPHEREx mission will help astronomers, including the UA’s Elisabeth Krause and Tim Eifler, understand how the universe evolved and probe our galaxy for the ingredients of life.

A new study conducted by UA planetary scientists suggests volcanoes may have been recently boiling deep below the surface of the Red Planet.

In 1969, UA scientists were the first to detect the optical flash from a pulsar — a stellar corpse thought to pack at least one-and-a-half times the mass of our sun into a neutron star.

The awards keep coming for Robert C. Kennicutt Jr., who was recently honored by both the National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Astronomical Society.

Astronauts who embarked on spaceflights lasting longer than six months experienced a decrease in the functionality of NK cells, which play an important role of the immune system by killing cancerous cells and preventing viruses from reactivating.

Two UA-managed telescopes have aided in the serendipitous discovery of the brightest quasar ever seen in the early universe, which suggests there could be more waiting to be discovered.

An international team led by Teddy Kareta, a doctoral student at the UA's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, investigated (3200) Phaethon, a bizarre asteroid that sometimes behaves like a comet, and found it even more enigmatic than previously thought.