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Yesterday, we presented an article in which we detailed the claims of two astronomers, Director of the Buckingham Centre for Astrobiology professor Chandra Wickramasinghe and his colleague Dr Max Wallis from the University of Cardiff; they proposed that Rosetta’s lander Philae may have actually landed on an inhabited comet – as the black slime on the […]
Our Universe may be riddled with millions of supermassive black holes, a new study reports. The reason why we haven’t yet discovered them is because they are shrouded in thick clouds of dust and gas, and because we weren’t looking with the right telescope. Using NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) satellite observatory, astronomers from Durham […]
Dylan O’Donnell, an amateur photographer, took one of the luckiest shots ever: the International Space Station past the moon. Any astro buff would be envious.
Comet lander Philae may be sitting on top of microbial life and not even know it – even worse, it has no way of figuring out if it actually is. According to two researchers, the comet’s characteristics (as well as computer simulations) might indicate that the surface may be teeming with microbes. The Rosetta spacecraft was […]
We've kept you up to date with New Horizon's progress, and the pictures it took of Pluto; now, after 10 years and 3 billion miles, the shuttle will pass close to Pluto - only 7,800 miles away from it.
Rosetta is a robotic space probe built and launched by the European Space Agency. Along with Philae, its lander module, the craft is performing a detailed study of comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko. The probe usually orbits 67P at a distance of a few hundred kilometers. Footage received from Rosetta over the last year showed a number of dust […]
Samantha Cristoforetti, an astronaut currently on board the International Space Station was allowed to take some extra food with her (astronauts are allowed to take “comfort food” with them for psychological reasons – a little something that reminds them of home). Today, she’ll be telling us how to make some space tortillas. Cooking in microgravity […]
Last night, Jupiter and Venus nearly converged on the night sky, being so close that you actually don’t need a telescope to see their celestial dance. “Throughout the month of June 2015, the two brightest planets in the night sky, Venus and Jupiter, are going to converge for a close jaw-dropping encounter,”said NASA in […]
NASA is preparing to send a drone to Mars by 2024 - they've already developed a small, lightweight craft that could conduct aerial surveys and identify potential landing areas and zones of interest.
Tomorrow, something extraordinary will happen, even though you might not notice it: right before 8 p.m. Eastern time, we will be adding an extra second – a leap second. Aside for being an interesting quirk, this is another reminder that our time isn’t exactly synced with solar time, and every once in a while, we need […]
Today was a bad day for science after SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket exploded shortly after taking off from Cape Canaveral, Florida. This is the second successive botched mission whose goal was to re-supply the International Space Station, and the third in the past 8 eight months. The Dragon Capsule was supposed to reach the space station with 5,200 pounds of space station cargo, including the first docking port designed for future commercial crew capsules and the custom tailored Microsoft HoloLenses for virtual reality.
Racing at a pace of about 1 millions per day, the New Horizon craft is getting closer to Pluto and so are the pictures itțs beaming back. Previously, we've shown you the first colored pics of Pluto taken by New Horizon, and its moons. Some of you were disappointed when you got to see only a couple of pale pixels, so this latest shot taken just this morning might be more exciting to watch.
The whole media is abuzz after NASA released some pictures of the dwarf planet Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt, which lies between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. But while it's somewhat expected for pseudoscientists and alien fanatics went crazy after they spotted what appears to be a huge pyramid-shaped mountain, I was expecting more from the mainstream media. I know, right?
This weekend, SpaceX is scheduled to deliver cargo and other much needed supplies to the International Space Station via its Dragon capsule. Among the supplies is a surprise for the astronauts on board: the latest high tech gadget from Microsoft, the HoloLens. If you missed ZME Science's feature of the HoloLens, well you're in for a treat if this is the first time you hear about it. Basically, the tech involves using holographic computing which enables you to mix virtual reality with ..actual reality. Holograms following in your kitchen, weather reports on your coffee cup. Really, anything is possible with the HoloLens, let alone in the final frontier: space.
Astronomers using the Hubble telescope have identified a warm Neptune-sized planet that is "bleeding" a huge hydrogen cloud - thus increasing the odds of finding liquid oceans on gas giants.
NASA released the breathtaking image you see below, announcing that it is basically X-ray light echoes reflecting off clouds of dust. But this image does more than thrill us amateur stargazers – it helps astronomers figure out how far away the double star system Circinus X-1 is from Earth. “It’s really hard to get accurate distance measurements […]
Researchers from the European Space Agency (ESA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) have been trying to figure out how Titan's seas formed - more exactly, how the depressions in which the seas are formed.
Astronomers have discovered a whopping 854 new ultra-dark galaxies which might have large quantities of the elusive dark matter, which makes out most of our universe.
NASA's spacecraft Dawn is currently orbiting Ceres - a dwarf planet and the largest object in the asteroid belt - in order to study this highly fascinating, yet enigmatic object. For instance, strange and peculiar brights spots on its surface are still puzzling scientists. NASA has kindly shared some of the photos documenting these brights spots, taken by Dawn from only 2,700 miles above the surface.
It almost looks like a sci-fi movie; in a small, crammed room at the Goddard Space Flight Center, a group of brilliant NASA researchers are discussing ways to protect our planet from dangerous asteroids. But this is not a movie, it’s reality – and it’s happening now. So how big is the threat from asteroids? Spoiler […]
Astronomers have discovered the oldest known stars lurking in a super-luminous galaxy - they may very well be among the very first objects that formed in the history of the Universe.
As the ISS hurtles in orbit around the Earth, an eternal freefall at 17,100 mph, its cameras, and the astronauts on board, are capturing images and footage of our planet below -- much of which is from NASA, and therefore public domain.
The Moon doesn’t have an atmosphere, but it is surrounded by a thick dust cloud; the dust constantly falls down to the lunar surface, but new dust constantly jumps to replenish it. The pattern of dust falling back to its home “in due time … will fill in craters,” says the University of Colorado, Boulder’s Mihaly […]
Sampling impact glass from the ancient craters that litter the surface for Mars might prove key to settling a long debate: did Mars ever harbor life? Researchers at NASA believe this is a great lead after the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) currently hovering above the red planet found deposits of glass. These were formed by impacts with large asteroids, whose blast trapped and preserved any matter it came across: dust, soil or any plants or bacteria (if there ever were such things). Cracking open these glass time capsules and peering inside could, thus, be one of the best places to look for.
Later last year, ZME Science revealed that one of Elon Musk's top priorities in the future is deploying a massive fleet of micro-satellites into Earth's low orbit to provide internet and mobile data. The plan is to serve internet to billions in the developing world, but to do so the service needs to be very, very cheap. At the same time, while launching thousands of satellites into space doesn't sound particularly cheap, but if there's any company good at launching cargo into space affordably that's SpaceX. This isn't exactly a pipe dream, and Musk seems very serious about it considering he just filled an official request to the FCC to gain permission for a test of the satellite internet, according to the Washington Post.
The SpaceX Dragon crew capsule's milestone safety state which took place the other day passed NASA's approval board. Back then, the capsule was launched atop a trunk powered by eight SuperDraco engines to a height of 1,187 meters (3,900 feet) at 345mph. The capsule then separated from the trunk and deployed three parachutes that touched it down for a splash in the Atlantic, very close to shore.
The nature of bright swirl patterns, some extending for hundreds of kilometers, on the moon's surface has eluded researchers for years. Now, the mystery seems to have been solved after a computer simulation suggests these were made following comet impacts. The tails of the comet, through made up of light-weight ice particles, likely blew off the upper, dark layer of the moon's surface, leaving behind a bright trail.
High up in Chile's Las Campanas Observatory, right in the middle of the desert, work will soon start to build the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) - the biggest telescope in the world once finished. The site was cleared before, but actual deployment just recently commenced following a $500 million pledge from 11 international partners. The total cost of the project is $1 billion. Once the giant telescope will be open, sometime around 2021, it will be used to peer the sky for neighboring potentially habitable planets, dark matter and dark energy, supermassive black holes and detect some of the first light emitted in the Universe.
With NASA's New Horizons shuttle basically knocking on Pluto's door, Mark Showalter and Douglas Hamilton present new theories on Pluto's moons and make predictions about what New Horizons will observe. They propose complex interactions and an intricate "dance" of Pluto's moons - a miniature version of our solar system.
Fifty years ago today, on June 3rd, 1965, 19:46, astronaut Edward White pushed away from the Gemini 4 capsule and into history as the first American to walk in space. Although a Russian had been the first to float in space, Ed White was determined to be the first to use jet propulsion to actually maneuver himself […]
Mars has auroras too, and in addition to the red and green tinted Northern Lights here on Earth, these also come in blue. According to NASA, these should be visible to the naked eye if a Martian astronaut were to look to the sky from one of the two poles.
Today, NASA is performing a new test round for its low-density supersonic decelerator (LDSD), which is basically a giant stop and break system for heavy duty crafts landing on Mars. Both the Curiosity Rover (2012) and the twin Viking probes (1976) used the same parachute to slow their supersonic descent and land safely on the Martian surface. These parachutes, however, can't handle more than a tone worth of payload, and if humans are ever to touch the planet's surface they'd need to land 15 to 20 tones of payload. The LDSD system deployed by NASA and slated for a test run above the Pacific might be the technology we've been waiting for.
For decades, researchers have studied our planet’s orbit with growing interest: is there something special about the way the Earth revolves around the Sun, is it a necessary condition for life to emerge? A team of researchers from MIT studied 74 Earth-sized exoplanets and reports that all of them have fairly circular orbits around their […]
After a successful launch and deploy to Earth's orbit on the back of the powerful United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket out of Cape Canaveral, the LightSail went silent for eight straight days. Spirits were high and nerves tense, but apparently the craft managed to solve the communication glitch all by itself. Like always, "have you tried switching it off and on?" Following the self-reboot, engineers immediately uploaded a new patch and hopefully we'll see Lightsail unravel its photon harvesting wings soon enough. The LightSail, currently strapped to a CubeSat, might then be deployed through and out the solar system.
In the past couple of months, we've posted quite a lot of articles about the New Horizons spacecraft zooming in on Pluto. It got close enough to see its moons, to see it in color, and to see it at unprecedented resolution. Now, New Horizons got even closer to Pluto and guess what - it took some even better photos.
Six mice were spent 91 days on board the Internationals Space Station in 2009, or seven years in the life of a mouse. Comparing their tissue characteristics with mice living in the same conditions, only on Earth, researchers found micro-gravity induces some peculiar biological changes. For instance, the mice's skin was thinner and their hair grew more. Like humans, mice too suffer from muscle and bone atrophy in micro-gravity, which prompted scientists to consider them as reliable models for studying the effect of living in space for extended periods of time. Previously, human astronauts have complained about skin dryness and irritation and these latest findings seems to suggest that these may indeed be caused by micro-gravity.
Sending a probe to look for alien life is just half of the work - it's the tools you send there that will actually do the job, and NASA has decided which tools it wants to send to Jupiter's moon Europa, a place considered by many the likeliest to hold alien life.
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) announced on Monday its strategic framework for a newly established space agency, and also the first academic space program in the federation. The Space Research Center will be the first of its kind in the Middle East, as will be a graduate degree program in Advanced Space Science at the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology and Orbital ATK Inc. What's the federation's end game, though? Last year, UAE announced it will launch an orbiting probe around Mars in 2020. Is it all about scientific missions or, like Dubai's towering skyscrapers, merely a show of force, of grandeur? Apparently, it's part science, part showoff, part money. It's hard to tell at this point which weighed more when UAE first considered its new space agency and subsequent missions.
Astronomers have captured a glimpse in the life of a massive star, a brief transitory stage in its evolution that might reveal the secrets of a unique class of stars. It’s called Nasty1, a name derived from its catalogue name, NaSt1; but the name is quite fitting, considering that the star itself has a pretty erratic […]
According to the Chinese Central Television, China wants to land rover on the far side of the moon, also know as the dark side of the moon, by 2020. This would make it the first nation to land a spacecraft of any sort there. First, the rover will orbit the moon piggy-bagged by the Chang'e 4 spacecraft then later deployed to a launch site. The rover will carry out some scientific missions, but the main goal really is to test China's space launching capabilities, but also as a show of force. Flex those muscles, sort to speak. Some analysts, however, speak out that there might be more to it, namely a bid for the moon's resources.
There are two types of galaxies: 'alive' and 'dead' ones. Those galaxies that are still alive are called so because they still produce stars inside, while the dead ones are stripped and devoid of their stellar nurseries. In a case of forensic astronomy of the utmost importance, a team at the University of Cambridge and the Royal Observatory Edinburgh has revealed the leading cause of death for most deceased galaxies of average size: death by strangulation. What remains now is to identify the killer, the researchers say.
An innovative concept might allow engineers to send probes on Mars in previously inaccessible locations. The project, called MARSDROP, would send two landers to the Red Planet, where they would detach from the shuttle and glide down to the planetary surface.
Astronauts onboard the ISS may soon get a new "toy" - a space laser cannon to blast off space debris that might threaten the space station. Even a tiny scratch or dent could cause massive problems, and with us putting more and more stuff in space, the risk of damage constantly increases too.
Astronauts onboard the International Space Station were given a treat - they witnessed one of the most spectacular natural phenomenon on Earth, from space. From onboard the station, Terry Virts also filmed it and took some pictures, so we can all enjoy.
That's the sun setting over the rim of Gale Crater on Mars, as shot by the Curiosity Rover. Notice some differences? Well, first of all, the sun looks a lot smaller. Of course, it should look smaller considering Mars is farther away from the sun than Earth is. This way, the sun looks approximately two-thirds as big as from our own planet. Next, that's a blue-tinted sunset, fading out in a pinkish tinge. In terms of colors, that's more or less the exact opposite of what happens here on Earth where sunsets tend to fade from warm, ruddy colors like orange-red. This can be explained by the differences between airborne particles in the two atmospheres.
NASA has partnered with a private company to design and build an oxygen production facility for a Martian outpost or colony. The make the oxygen, bacteria and algae would use the nitrogen-rich Martian soil to make the precious oxygen, essential for the astronauts' survival. It can be used to make air, water and fuel.
NASA is offering up to $2.25 million to anyone that can successfully design a habitat that can be 3D printed on Mars. The announcement is part of a broader attempt by NASA to outsource ideas and projects.
A team of astronomers has discovered a unique system of quadruple quasars. The quartet, discovered at the very edge of the universe, is one of the most massive structures in the known universe.
Nine years and 3 billion miles later, New Horizon finally got close enough to Pluto to spot it along with all its faint moons. The probe photographed Pluto's five "underworld" satellites, Charon, Nix, Hydra, Kerberos, and Styx, Long Range Reconnaissance Imager with 10 seconds exposure. Light is a bit faint once you're so far away from the sun that there aren't any planets left to explore. Not if you count Pluto as one, though, since New Horizon will flyby past it in July. Some still stick to calling Pluto a planet, though officially it's been demoted to dwarf planet status.
At the Canadian Institute of Mining's annual convention, NASA scientists said exploration and prospecting of celestial bodies like the moon or asteroids is decades away, but even so this shouldn't stop regulations from being well established in advance. At the event, concerns were raised that ownership and management of resources in outer space are still far from being resolved.
