Space.com contributing writer Stefanie Waldek is a self-taught space nerd and aviation geek who is passionate about all things spaceflight and astronomy. With a background in travel and design journalism, as well as a Bachelor of Arts degree from New York University, she specializes in the budding space tourism industry and Earth-based astrotourism. In her free time, you can find her watching rocket launches or looking up at the stars, wondering what is out there. Learn more about her work at www.stefaniewaldek.com.
Latest articles by Stefanie Waldek

By Stefanie Waldek Published
A new study debates the complex ethical questions that must be considered if we're to terraform Mars and lays the blueprint for a potential path forward.

By Stefanie Waldek Published
A supernova remnant (SNR) discovered by astrophysicist Miroslav Filipović of Western Sydney University displays an astonishingly spherical shape.

By Stefanie Waldek Published
Scientists have discovered 26 previously unknown bacterial species in the clean rooms that were used to prep NASA's Phoenix Mars lander for its 2007 launch.

By Stefanie Waldek Published
"Even slight downward shifts in land can significantly compromise the structural integrity of buildings, roads, bridges, and railways over time."

By Stefanie Waldek Published
A combination of X-ray from NASA's Chandra observatory and radio data indicates that a galactic "fracture" was likely caused by a special neutron star called a pulsar.

By Daisy Dobrijevic Last updated
Reference The northern lights are one of the most mesmerizing natural wonders you can witness firsthand.

By Stefanie Waldek Published
The James Webb Space Telescope has observed surface ice methanol — a key building block for organic compounds necessary for life, including sugars — on trans-Neptunian objects.

By Stefanie Waldek Published
For the first time, scientists have identified climate change as the top driver of human-caused biodiversity loss among species protected under the Endangered Species Act.

By Stefanie Waldek Last updated
On Easter Sunday (April 20), NASA's Lucy probe should have zipped past the asteroid Donaldjohanson, testing science instruments on the space rock.

By Stefanie Waldek Published
Using NASA's Perseverance rover to analyze Martian rocks, researchers suggest that Mars' complex volcanism might hold clues about the planet's ancient habitability.

By Stefanie Waldek Published
Hiroyasu Tsukamota has developed a deep-learning-based guidance and control framework called Neural-Rendezvous that could allow spacecraft to safely encounter interstellar objects.

By Stefanie Waldek Published
The grand total of Saturnian moons is now 274.

By Stefanie Waldek Last updated
For starters, they taught us that Earth is round

By Stefanie Waldek Published
A distant star-killing supernova could have bombarded Earth with radiation strong enough to shift the course of evolution.

By Stefanie Waldek Published
Rippled textures in a shallow lake bed on Mars indicate that ice-free liquid water once pooled here.

By Stefanie Waldek Published
Not much, unless we're talking about spacecraft.

By Stefanie Waldek Published
The Kumani Bank mud volcano in the Caspian Sea created an island in early 2023 that had almost disappeared by the end of 2024, according to Landsate satellite imagery.

By Stefanie Waldek Published
Ashley Zelinskie's VR artwork Twin Quasar was inspired by the iconic deep-space image from the James Webb Space Telescope that introduced a new audience to gravitational lensing.

By Stefanie Waldek Published
2024 was the warmest year on record, according to NASA data. The global average temperature was 2.3 degrees Fahrenheit above the mid-20th-century baseline.

By Stefanie Waldek Published
The European Space Agency has released an audio-visual representation of solar activity over the last three years, using data from the Solar Orbiter probe.

By Stefanie Waldek Published
Snow dots the Martian landscape in these images from ESA's Mars Express orbiter and NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

By Stefanie Waldek Published
The last meteor shower of the year peaks in the early morning hours of Dec. 22.

By Stefanie Waldek Published
The James Webb Space Telescope used a galaxy as a cosmic magnifying glass to find transient objects in the "Christmas Tree" cluster, a Winter Wonderland of even more galaxies.
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