A first-of-its-kind cooler for NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled to launch in 2018, has completed testing at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

A look back on the preparations for the 25 April liftoff of Sentinel-1B

Space science image of the week: A young star in the final stages of birth offers a glimpse at the way our Sun formed 4.6 billion years ago

Light pollution has reached levels where many people can’t see the “arms” of our home galaxy.

Elon Musk reveals news about his plan for a manned Mars mission.

NASA’s Dawn mission, the first spacecraft to orbit two extraterrestrial targets, has been honored with the National Aeronautic Association’s 2016 Robert J. Collier Trophy.

Our week through the lens: 6-10 June 2016

Temperature records from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter reveal three distinct seasonal dust storms on Mars.

After decades of research to discern seasonal patterns in Martian dust storms from images showing the dust, but the clearest pattern appears to be captured by measuring the temperature of the Red Planet’s atmosphere.

NASA’s Juno mission is now 26 days and 11.1 million miles (17.8 million kilometers) away from the largest planetary inhabitant in our solar system — Jupiter.

A new algorithm could finally reveal the splendors of a black hole. The MIT grad student who wrote it just needs a dozen radio telescopes worldwide to do it.

Join us Friday, 10 June, at 10:00 CEST for the ‘Earth from Space’ video programme. This week features a Sentinel-3A image of the UK

Operations image of the week: Mission controllers use these cold-gas thrusters to keep LISA Pathfinder where it needs to be

Hot Jupiters may be harboring atmospheric water shrouded by thick haze layers.

Scientists found that a group of hot Jupiters observed with Hubble may have about half their atmospheres blocked by clouds or haze.

Technology image of the week: these varied integrated circuits, etched onto a single piece of silicon, endow Europe’s space missions with intelligence

By tweaking the numbers in Kepler data, Michelle Kunimoto managed to find four very different worlds.

1 billion light years away, a hungry galactic center got a whiff of cold gas “rain.”

There’s a possibility that these red giants were dimmed after they were stripped of tens of percent of their mass millions of years ago during repeated collisions with an accretion disk at the galactic center.

LISA Pathfinder, a mission led by the European Space Agency (ESA) with contributions from NASA, has successfully tested a key technology needed to build a space-based observatory for detecting gravitational waves.

Human spaceflight and robotic operations image of the week: Aurora and stars over Concordia research station in Antarctica

Media briefing replay: LISA Pathfinder scientists present first results on the key technologies needed to observe gravitational waves from space

ESA’s LISA Pathfinder mission has demonstrated the technology needed to build a space-based gravitational wave observatory.

New research suggests that planet formation in the early universe might have created carbon planets consisting of graphite, carbides, and diamond.

The LISA Pathfinder mission paves the way for a future of gravitational wave observatories in space.

Asteroid mining is making the leap from science fiction novels and into corporate boardrooms as new technologies bring the idea within reach.

“The Colours of Cooperation” is the theme of Ecsite 2016, taking place 7-11 June in Graz, Austria

The oldest stars in the Milky Way may give us an insight into the formation of our galaxy

Space Science Image of the Week: Planck’s view of a giant loop of microwaves that defies easy explanation

The ingenuity of four space engineers has created a zero-emission air-conditioning system that doesn’t pollute our atmosphere when we turn it on.

Research shows that more oxygen, carbon, and iron atoms exist in the sprawling gaseous halos outside galaxies than exist within the galaxies themselves.

The “heavy-metal stars” are nearly 10.5 billion years old.

Dutch company Orbital Eye has developed a service that uses satellites to monitor gas and oil pipelines. A major African pipeline operator has already signed up for the service.

Our week through the lens: 30 May-3 June 2016

Looking back at Pluto with images like this gives New Horizons scientists information about Pluto’s hazes and surface properties that they can’t get from images taken on approach.

A new show at the Adler Planetarium tells the story of Planet Nine, by way of the Kuiper Belt.

This surprising finding may be an important clue to understanding those mysterious parts of the universe that make up 95 percent of everything and don’t emit light, such as dark energy, dark matter, and dark radiation.

Earth observation image of the week: A Sentinel-2A image of Maine and New Hampshire, USA

A JPL microbiologist is studying fungi and bacteria as part of International Space Station research.

NASA’s CORAL campaign will survey reef ecosystems from Hawaii to Australia. Here are a few fast facts about reefs and the way they’re studied.

Surveyor 1 landed on the moon on June 2, 1966, marking humanity’s first controlled touchdown on the lunar surface.

Take a narrated tour of the International Space Station in six languages in this video – also available in 3D

Join us Friday, 3 June, at 10:00 CEST for the ‘Earth from Space’ video programme. This week, Sentinel-2 takes us over Maine and New Hampshire in the northeast US

First results from ESA’s mission to demonstrate gravitational-wave technology will be presented on Tuesday, 7 June. Watch livestream from 09:30 GMT and join a Reddit AMA session at 12:00 GMT

A new study finds that Galileo’s atmospheric probe may have stumbled into an anomalous structure just below the uppermost clouds.

This will open a whole new realm of research into how galaxies evolve and interact with their surroundings over cosmic time.

In a reservoir that’s likely several miles deep in some places, solid nitrogen warmed by Pluto’s modest internal heat becomes buoyant and rises up in great blobs before cooling off and sinking again to renew the cycle.

Technology image of the week: The Large European Acoustic Facility looks like a giant sound speaker, and that’s precisely what it is

ESA today unveiled the first Sentinel-1 satellite images sent via the European Data Relay System’s world-leading laser technology in high orbit

This famous king of Egypt might have had a space dagger in his collection of relics

A new study indicates the bodies of some periodic comets may regularly split in two, then reunite down the road.

Plans to get to Mars are nothing new. They’re as old as NASA itself.

The mass of the Milky Way, so far, is 7 x 1011 solar masses.

For a low-lying, densely populated country like the Netherlands, monitoring subsidence is critical. Until recently, tiny displacements in the ground beneath our feet couldn’t be mapped nationally but, thanks to the Sentinel-1 mission, this is now possible.

PRISM is advancing scientists’ ability to study hard-to-see phenomena in coastal waters.

To find out what’s going on around the weirdest star in the galaxy, astronomers are turning to crowdfunding.

The Sentinel-2 satellite recently captured this image of wildfires in Canada’s Alberta province

A modest “webcam” on Mars Express has proven useful for outreach, education, and citizen-science. Now ESA has decided to adopt it as a professional science instrument.

Human spaceflight and robotic exploration image of the week: The International Space Station and planet Mercury pass in front of the Sun

Space science image of the week: A young star fights its way through birth clouds cloaked in a golden swathe of light

In the run up to Asteroid Day on 30 June, this video details the micro-lander envisaged as part of ESA’s proposed Asteroid Impact Mission

Jupiter is now the most dominant gravitational force in the Juno spacecraft’s universe.

Ingredients regarded as crucial for the origin of life on Earth have been discovered at the comet that ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft has been probing for almost two years.

Our week through the lens: 23-27 May 2016

Scientists project Jupiter’s gravity will dominate as the trajectory-perturbing effects by other celestial bodies are reduced to insignificant roles.

Kepler-62f is approximately 40 percent larger than Earth and, at that size, is within the range of planets that are likely to be rocky and possibly could have oceans.

Video highlights from the space-inspired fashion show at London’s Science Museum, 25 May

A changing climate may be headed Mars’ way after a prolonged ice age.

Scientists using radar data from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) have found a record of the most recent Martian ice age recorded in the planet’s north polar ice cap.

Images from the space-inspired fashion project Couture in Orbit

Cyclone Roanu has claimed over 100 lives in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, and has left tens of thousands in need of aid. Officials are looking to the sky for information on flooded areas to analyse the cyclone’s aftermath and support emergency response activities.

Satcoms in rural primary schools in the Mpumalanga province of South Africa looks set to expand following the success of a pilot project.

Join us Friday, 27 May, at 10:00 CEST for the ‘Earth from Space’ video programme. This week features a Sentinel-2A image of Chile

Operations image of the week: Three images of Mars acquired by two cameras in space and one in Australia

When looking for planets that could harbor life, scientists look for planets in the “habitable zones” around their stars — at the right distance from the stars to allow water to exist in liquid form.

Until now, it was thought that the cracks were the result of geodynamical processes, such as plate tectonics, but the models suggest that a close encounter with another body might have been the cause.

Technology image of the week: this half-scale model of ESA’s next lander to a small body goes on show at next week’s ILA Berlin Air Show

A modest ‘webcam’ on Mars Express has proven useful for outreach, education and citizen-science. Now ESA have decided to adopt it as a professional science instrument.

NASA said its last good-bye to the Spirit rover five years ago, but the mobile science station packed a lot of discoveries into its time on the Red Planet.

“Red geyser” galaxies point to a late stage for galaxies where star formation is nearly impossible.

This discovery supports the idea that planets form in much shorter timescales than previously thought and prompts a reconsideration of alternative planet formation scenarios.