The Columbia disaster: Looking back On the morning of February 1, 2003, the Columbia orbiter was heading home from a 16-day mission to space.

To date, about 38-40 percent of the Columbia orbiter's wreckage has been recovered. The remainder was either burned up during reentry or is still where it landed in Texas and Louisiana.

Foam has always been a concern since the first space shuttle mission in April 1981. Several pieces of ice-encrusted foam struck and damaged the Columbia orbiter during its Jan. 16, 2003, launch.

Planetary Society Recovers Columbia Shuttle ExperimentOn May 5 and 6, The Planetary Society joined with Instrumentation Technology Associates (ITA) in retrieving its astrobiology experiment ...

The Solar Orbiter mission has captured the highest-resolution views of the sun’s surface to date, showcasing massive sunspots related to increasing solar activity.

The robotic Solar Orbiter spacecraft has obtained the first images ever taken of our sun's two poles as scientists seek a deeper understanding of Earth's host star, including its magnetic field ...

Others however have let us look past our solar system and galaxy like the Chandra X-ray Observatory launched on the Columbia orbiter. But none has quite captured human’s curiosity and changed our ...

Solar Orbiter launched in February 2020, carrying its onboard telescope to just about one-quarter the distance of Earth from the Sun to provide high-resolution, close-up observations of the host star.

WASHINGTON - NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe on Monday dedicated a memorial to the crew of space shuttle Columbia at Arlington National Cemetery, eulogizing the astronauts as "pilots, engineers ...

The European Space Agency's Solar Orbiter, which launched in 2020 from Cape Canaveral, captured the first-ever images of the sun's south pole.

ESA's Solar Orbiter captured a "tube of cooler atmospheric gases snaking its way through the Sun’s magnetic field," according to ESA. See it "slither" in these time-lapsed views.