SPACE SCIENCE REFERENCE / EST. 2026
Explore NASA imagery, spacecraft, astronauts, unusual observations, live orbital data, and sourced reference catalogs.
BROWSE THE ARCHIVE ↘Current position, altitude, speed, crew, and orbit estimates.
NASA DAILY FEEDPICTURE OF THE DAYToday’s selected astronomy image, description, date, and credit.
REFERENCE CATALOG11 EXOPLANETSCompare selected confirmed worlds by size, orbit, and distance.
HISTORICAL DATABASE18 LAUNCHESLandmark rockets, payloads, outcomes, dates, and launch sites.
01 / NASA IMAGERY
Open a photo for verified context, image credit, and a link to the NASA source.
02 / SPACECRAFT
Spacecraft selected for their scientific, engineering, or historical importance.
03 / HUMAN SPACEFLIGHT
Selected people who flew beyond Earth, with mission context and maximum distance.
04 / OPEN QUESTIONS
Documented events with incomplete, debated, or initially surprising explanations.
Status labels summarize the present scientific record. They are not probability scores and make no claim of extraterrestrial origin.
A powerful narrowband signal appeared for 72 seconds in 1977, rose and fell with the Big Ear telescope’s beam, and has never been detected again.
NASA’s IMAGE satellite went silent in 2005. An amateur astronomer unexpectedly found it transmitting again in 2018 after more than twelve years.
Sedna follows an extremely elongated orbit far beyond Neptune. The known planets cannot easily explain how it was placed there.
Contact ended in 1993 while the spacecraft’s transmitter was intentionally off, leaving investigators without telemetry from the failure itself.
KIC 8462852 produced deep, irregular dips in brightness unlike an ordinary planet transit. Later color data strongly favored fine dust.
The first known interstellar visitor followed a slightly non-gravitational path, yet telescopes saw no obvious comet-like coma or tail.
05 / QUICK REFERENCE
Short, sourced facts from NASA mission and planetary records.
Venus takes 243 Earth days to rotate once, but only 225 Earth days to orbit the Sun. It also spins backward compared with most planets.
NASA SOURCE ↗A neutron star can pack more mass than the Sun into a sphere only about 10 miles wide.
NASA SOURCE ↗Fine Martian dust scatters blue light close to the Sun at sunrise and sunset, while the daytime sky appears reddish.
NASA SOURCE ↗Deep craters near the poles stay in permanent shadow, cold enough to preserve ice despite Mercury’s closeness to the Sun.
NASA SOURCE ↗Olympus Mons is the largest volcano known in the solar system, with broad, surprisingly shallow slopes.
NASA SOURCE ↗06 / EDITORIAL
Long-form explainers, mission notes, and updates will be published here.
07 / COMMUNITY
Leave a short public comment about the archive.