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While 3-D scanning the Columbia command module used by the Apollo 11 astronauts to splash down back on Earth, researchers found some amazing artifacts: graffiti markings.
Part of NASA JPL's Exoplanet Travel Bureau series, these 14 posters show such locales as Mars, Jupiter's moon Europa, Saturn's vapor-spewing moon Enceladus, and the dwarf planet Ceres. They're all available for free in massive resolution (PDF and TIFF format), so you can download, print and hang in your living room. Enjoy!
Russian scientists have found a way to use the country’s surplus of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) to protect themselves from another threat: falling meteorites and asteroids. I’m happy to see that more and more people are starting to look at ways to protect Earth in the case of an incoming asteroid. In January, NASA announced the […]
In one scenario, parts would spiral farther than the moon!
One of Saturn's ring, which is very opaque and bright seems to have played an optical illusions all along. It is in fact much lighter than previously though -- as little as a seventh of the mass it appears to have.
New data provided by the New Horizons mission showed that water ice on Pluto is much more common than we thought.
It may be possible to observe the presence of an advanced alien civilization by the effects produced if that civilization were to self-destruct through nuclear war, biological warfare, nanotechnological annihilation, or stellar pollution. Each case would generate unique detectable signs that could be identified by earth-based telescopes.
China’s National Space Administration released a trove of images from their lunar rover and they’re spectacular. We’re talking hundreds of tantalizing, HD and never-before-seen images of the Moon! You can set up an account on China’s Science and Application Center for Moon and Deepspace Exploration website and have a look for yourself, view and download all the […]
Europe's laser communication network has taken off!
Researchers at European Space Agency (ESA) collected fungi that live in one of the harshest places on Earth -- McMurdo Dry Valleys, Antarctica -- then shipped some to the ISS. Here, populations were subjected to both a Martian environment and directly exposed to space. In both situations, fungi survived after 18 months though those breeding in the Martian environment proved to be far better adapted. Lichen were also tested under the same circumstances. These too survived, which gives hope that there might be a chance for life on Mars to exist.
Considering how inhospitable Mars is, given there's no air, -55C temperatures, radiation and all, you might think the quality of sleep on Mars is our last concern. A new study suggests that a permanent jet lag on Mars might come with some serious health risks, so maybe we should take this more seriously.
Astronomers find the parent of an orphan planet. The finding makes the solar system the biggest in the galaxy.
NASA is very close to reaching a milestone in the construction of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), Hubble's successor that will be launched in 2018.
An altered periodic table that shows how each elements was forged.
Where are all the aliens? Why haven’t we seen or heard their signals from space? Could we really have been the only planet where life evolved?
This bright orange zinnia was grown in the Vegetable Production System (also known as the gloriously puny "Veggie"), a deployable unit built to sustain a range of crops including lettuce -- the first space-grown crop that the ISS taste-tested in August.
A duo of astronomers from CalTech may have found another planet, far away in our solar system.
Japanese astronomers may have discovered an intermediate black hole close to the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way. This finding could help explain how supermassive black holes form at the center of galaxies. Most galaxies we know of have a supermassive black hole (SMBH) at their center. The name is pretty self explanatory – […]
There's a now a third private space entity that's been screened and granted permission to ferry cargo to and fro the International Space Station. Joining SpaceX and Orbital will be the Sierra Nevada Corp. which plans to use a reusable winged craft that looks like a mini-shuttle. The design allows for a soft landing on a runway, instead of dropping the ocean, that might prove more effective for retrieving sensitive scientific instruments.
Juno is part of NASA’s New Frontiers program that wants to get up-close and personal with several planets in our solar system. The shuttle itself is going towards Jupiter to study its gravity field, magnetic field, and polar magnetosphere. Juno will also search for clues about how the planet formed, including whether it has a rocky core, the […]
For the first time in history, astronomers have solid clues of water ice on a comet, confirming what many theories already claimed.
The star was observed for the first time in June, but it's still radiating massive amounts of energy, making it shine 570 billion times stronger than our Sun.
You can't be an advanced civilization until you have a planetary defense office - and it sounds incredibly awesome no matter how you look at it.
Apollo 11: Eagle Has Landed NASA’s mission to better understand the Universe around us resulted not only in text, images and video, but also in a huge number of sounds. The space agency posted rocket sounds, the chirps of satellites and equipment, lightning on Jupiter, interstellar plasma and radio emissions and of course, famous vocal clips […]
The New Horizons shuttle has finished its Pluto flyby months ago, but NASA is continuing to receive breathtaking photos from it. The latest additions paint a ‘lava lamp’ surface on Pluto’s surface, likely a sea of nitrogen close to Pluto’s Sputnik Planum. Astronomers knew that Sputnik Planum was an icy plain, irregular and segmented by […]
The Milky Way has been around for at least 13.7 billion years, but it has its younger and older areas.
Fresh discoveries made by the Kepler mission remind us that there's a myriad of potentially habitable planets just waiting to be discovered.
Old-school letter writers will be able to adorn their envelopes this year with nice images of all the planets in the Solar System, as well as Pluto, the Moon and Star Trek icons. I can only assume how many people still use stamps and regular post, but I’m happy to see the US Post use something different than […]
SpaceX got a much deserved Christmas gift – on December 22nd, became the first group (private or state-owned) to ever launch a rocket and then safely land it on Earth where it can be used again. Now, new pictures reveal not only that the rocket survived, but that it’s in pretty good shape. It all started […]
Tropical Cyclone Ula formed on Dec. 30 and since then it brought 150-kilometre-an-hour winds, strong gusts and heavy rain in parts of Fiji and Tonga. NASA has been keeping an eye on the cyclone and its rainfall. The Global Precipitation Measurement or GPM core observatory satellite passed above Tropical Cyclone Ula when it was forming in […]
Before digital or overhead projectors were invented, for hundreds of years people enjoyed projecting large scale images on their walls using a fantastic invention called the magic lantern.
Many ancient civilizations made astronomical notes, but according to researchers, this is the earliest historical document of naked eye observations on a variable star – Algol. Variable stars are stars with a varying brightness (as seen from Earth), and they probably held a special place in Egyptian astronomy – they made careful notes on these […]
Chinese researchers say their lunar rover found a new type of lunar rock unlike anything the Americans or Soviets had brought home before.
Scientists want to grow potatoes on Mars to study crop resilience in the face of climate change. Brilliant or stupid?
YES! SpaceX made it! Wooohooo!
Over the last three years, NASA engineers have been exploring using additive technology, like 3D printing, to manufacture key rocket engine parts. Tests on individual parts had worked well. Now, the space agency fitted all the parts onto a special test bench that behaves like a real rocket engine and fired it up for a test. The engine fired at 90,000 RPMs for 10 seconds to produce 22,000 pounds of thrust, with all performance test parameters showing 'green'.
This celestial lightsaber does not lie in a galaxy far, far away, but rather inside our home galaxy.
It’s the closest Earth-like planet we’ve ever discovered: Wolf 1061c lies in the habitable zone, joining a very elite list of rocky planets that could host life. The planet, reported in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, is one of the three planets found by astronomers around a small red dwarf star called Wolf 1061 in the constellation Ophiuchus. […]
For the first time in history, the UK has a representative on the International Space Station. This morning, British astronaut Tim Peake made his first visit to the station, alongside two seasoned: Russia’s Yuri Malenchenko and NASA’s Tim Kopra. It was a flawless launch, as you can see below. Malechenko had to take manual control after the automated […]
After months of delays and years of underfunding, the US Congress finally revealed its plans for funding the federal government in 2016.
If you're an alien buff or just really, really bored with knowing just one species that can hold a decent conversation, this might come as a bummer. SETI has confirmed that KIC 8462852, the 1,500 light-years away star that's been all over the news as potentially having signs of an advanced alien megastructure built around it is just a regular, run of the mill, alien-free ball of atomic fire.
"There's a window that could be opened for a long time or a short time where we have an opportunity to establish a self-sustaining base on Mars," Musk says.
The image above is a timeline with each frame showcasing a stage in our Universe's evolution, from humble beginning to present date (left to right), as simulated by the Argonne National Laboratory. Called the Q Continuum simulation, this is the most complete cosmological simulation to date covering a volume of 1300 Mpc on a side (one Mpc = 3.08567758 × 1022 meters) where half a trillion particles evolved for a mass resolution of ~1.5x108 Msun.
While the windy and overcast weather of a stormy day isn't surprising on telluric planets, it's not something most of us readily associate with stars. But it does happen -- the best evidence for this is W1906+40, a distant dwarf star recently described in a study published in the Astrophysical Journal.
NASA just released an infrared composite image of Saturn's largest moon, constructed from images taken by the Cassini probe.
The Japanese Space Agency (JAXA) is probably celebrating right now, as their Akatsuki orbiter reached Venus on December 7. The first time JAXA tried to do this in 2010, they failed because the engine malfunctioned, and the shuttle didn’t enter the Venusian orbit. Aimlessly wandering into space without its main engines, the spacecraft appeared doomed […]
A team of Argentinian astronomers, peering up in the night's sky from the Astronomical Observatory of Córdoba has found a new, young lithium-rich giant star that they designated KIC 9821622. And they can't explain where that lithium comes from.
I know you don't like it, but the truth is science is politicized since, ultimately, serious research depends on funding. That doesn't mean, though, that politicians aren't sympathetic or that they do not understand the importance of science. Some seem to do, anyway. But perhaps the most vulnerable area of science to politics, however, is space exploration. Year after year, it seems like NASA's budget keep thinning. Although NASA is still the most resourceful space agency in the world and despite some amazing achievements (Curiosity rover on Mars or New Horizon's flyby past Pluto, just to name a few), things could be a lot better. Arguably, if NASA kept its stellar budget during the Apollo era, we would've likely been on Mars by now, maybe even with a permanent outpost.
Officially, US citizens are now entitled to any resources they mine off the moon, asteroid or any celestial body outside Earth.
Astronomers describe that the present-day tilt of the Moon is likely a result of collision-free encounters of the early Moon with small planetary bodies.
