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In 1976, Carl Sagan went on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson along with a strange contraption, that looked like a tinfoil square. In all likelihood it was probably tin foil, since it was only a model for what Sagan termed as a solar sail - a simple, but effective spacecraft that harnesses the solar winds to generate power, much like a sail uses the wind to move a ship here on Earth. On May 20th, a tiny satellite the size of a loaf of bread will be blasted into Earth's orbit from an Atlas V rocket that will test Sagan's design.
The MESSENGER spacecraft spent four years orbiting Mercury, gathering valuable information and sending it back to Earth. But even in its final moments, as it crashed towards the surface of the planet, the spacecraft still did its job - it reported that Mercury has a magnetic field, likely millions of years old.
Using its Mast Camera, the Curiosity Rover has snapped stunning images of a blue sunset on the Red Planet. The blue-tinted images show the Sun dipping into the horizon as blue streaks shroud the sky across the evening light.
A few days ago, we were telling you about the espresso machine 3D printed onboard the International Space Station. Now, it’s time to go full circle and look at how the coffee… gets out of the body. Here’s how astronauts use the toilet (yes, in case you’re wondering, this is suitable for viewing at work): […]
In an article published in the Astrophysical Journal last week, astronomers described a massive halo around the Andromeda Galaxy, extending up close to Earth. The team spotted the halo through NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and consider it one of the galaxy's most important features.
Researchers at University of California Irvine exposed mice to radiation similar to the cosmic rays that permeate space and found the animals experienced declines in cognition and changes in the structure and integrity of brain nerve cells and the synapses where nerve impulses are sent and received. The mice became easily confused and lost their tendency to explore new environments. Similar cognitive impairments are likely to be felt by astronauts traveling to Mars, according to the researchers. Even with shielding, the effects of cosmic rays exposure are sure to be noticed, considering the journey to Mars lasts six to eight months. This without counting the time spent on the red planet and the journey back home.
A few days ago, we were telling you about the first cup of coffee ever made in space, onboard the International Space Station, thanks to a 3D printed espresso machine. Along with it, six mugs were also supplied, but these are not just ordinary mugs; they have a sharp inner corner that allows the liquid to be pushed along the inside of the cup and towards the astronaut’s lips. So, now that we have the first spatial coffee, let's have a look at the person who made it.
A team of astronomers from Yale and the University of California-Santa Cruz have looked back in time, discovering a galaxy that was formed when the Universe was only 5% of its current age. This is now the farthest, and youngest galaxy known to date.
Last week, the Sun ejected a huge solar filament - a gigantic burst of hot plasma - and a satellite was just in the right place to capture the whole thing on tape.
Yesterday, Samantha Cristoforetti sipped the first coffee brewed in space using the newly delivered micro-gravity espresso machine. How befitting that the first espresso in space was made by an Italian. Living in space thus got a lot pleasant, but there's a lot more to this than just making life more enjoyable for the astronauts aboard the International Space Station. Along with the espresso machine, six carefully crafted coffee mugs were also supplied. Previously, to consume liquids astronauts had to suck them out of a plastic bag. The new 3-D printed, transparent jugs behave more like a coffee mug in normal Earth gravity. Exploiting capillary flow, the mugs have a sharp inner corner that allows the liquid to be pushed along the inside of the cup and towards the astronaut's lips.
Highschool students analyzing data obtained with the 100-meter Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope have discovered an exotic pulsar with the widest orbit known to date. Pulsars (pulsating radio stars) are some of the most spectacular things in the known Universe. They are basically highly magnetized, rotating neutron stars that emit beams of electromagnetic radiation. This radiation […]
Using the MUSE instrument aboard ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT), astronomers have made a three dimensional view of the famous Pillars of Creation - a photograph taken by Hubble 20 years ago showing elephant trunks of interstellar gas and dust in the Eagle Nebula, some 7,000 light years from Earth. The 3D image shows never before seen details of the dust columns, greatly expanding scientists' knowledge of how these formed, but also what's in stored for them in the future.
The New Horizons spacecraft snapped a picture of Pluto - the best we have so far. NASA released the information and pictures yesterday, along with the theory that Pluto may have a polar cap.
Water may have been plentiful in some parts of the universe as early as one billion years after the Big Bang, a new model suggests. That's a lot earlier than scientists had previously presumed, seeing how at the very beginning the only elements were hydrogen and helium. Seeing how water is comprised of one oxygen atom (16 times heavier than hydrogen) and two hydrogen atoms, then we should have seen water much later, or so the thinking goes.
Using three state of the art ground-based telescopes, a team of astronomers has identified three super-Earth exoplanets that are seven to eight times as massive as our own planet and orbit their parent star closer than Mercury orbits the sun. What's hot about the findings - apart from the planet's likely scorching surface - is that these were made using a novel automated approach, in which one telescope called the Automated Planet Finder (APF) Telescope at Lick Observatory in California was programmed to scour the night's sky and look for signs of nearby alien planets. These three planets are just the beginning of a new process that hopefully will return hundreds of planets in our neighborhood, all without the need for human supervision.
Just after NASA researchers made the bold claim that they will find alien life in less than 20 years, the space agency has officially launched a project to look for it. The Nexus for Exoplanet System Science, or “NExSS” will be a project integrating several fields of science, aiming to better understand exoplanets with the potential to host life, as well as planet-life interactions.
Good news for space exploration: Japan’s space agency JAXA revealed plans to land a rover on the Moon by 2018, joining a very small club of nations that directly explored our planet’s satellite. “This is an initial step and a lot of procedures are still ahead before the plan is formally approved,” a JAXA spokesperson told […]
According to the Department of Energy, the plutonium-238 stockpile is enough to make only three more nuclear batteries. These are used to power long-term space missions, like Curiosity rover now studying Mars on site, the Voyager probes which were launched in the 1970s and are now almost out of the solar system or New Horizon which is close to making the first Pluto flyby in history. New Horizon is also the fastest spacecraft ever built, racing at one million miles per day. All these remarkable achievements were made possible thanks to plutonium-238 and the technology developed to harness its heat.
These two dim dots are none other than Pluto, the dwarf plant, and Charon, its largest moon. Though it might not look like much, this is the first ever colored photograph of the two cosmic bodies ever taken. We have NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft to thank for this, which used its Ralph color imager to make the shot from 71 million miles away.
Today, SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket blasted off Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 4:10 p.m. EDT (2010 GMT) carrying the Dragon capsule to orbit, on slate for its rendezvous with the International Space Station where it's tasked with a resupply mission. Instead of dropping in the ocean like the gazillion other rockets before it, the first stage of Falcon was programmed to make a controlled landing on a "autonomous spaceport drone ship." The rocket did land on the spaceport, which is amazing in itself, but unfortunately it flipped over post landing and was damaged beyond repair. So, just almost!
This is the first map in a series of maps that will be stitched together to form a grand picture of how dark matter is distributed across the Universe. Dark matter is basically invisible, which is why it's called dark in the first place, so scientists rely on indirect observations like the gravitational effects it poses to locate and map it. What we're seeing now is only 3% of the area of sky that the Dark Energy Survey (DES) will document over its slated five-year-long mission.
NASA's Dawn spacecraft already has an impressive resume - it's traveled to the strange area between Mars and Jupiter and managed to start orbiting the dwarf planet Ceres, even though Ceres measures only 950 kilometers (590 miles) in diameter and has a very small gravitational field. But it's not stopping just yet - after previously revealing a number of black and white pictures, Dawn has now provided a color photograph, but here's the thing - it poses more questions than it answers.
Researchers have long known that Mars has water in the form of ice, but now, after years and years of research, we might finally have the decisive clue that our planetary neighbor has liquid water on its surface. The key find was perchlorate - a substance that significantly lowers the freezing point, so that water doesn't freeze into ice, but remains liquid and briny.
Astronomers have known for quite a while that Mars has distinct polar ice caps, but the Red Planet might also have belts of glaciers at its central latitudes in both the southern and northern hemispheres. These huge glaciers are covered by a thick layer of dust which masks them and makes them seem like they are actually part of the surface of the ground.
Just like our own planet, the sun goes through seasonal changes in its activity, waxing and waning over the course of nearly two years driven by changes in newly discovered bands of strong magnetic fields. This variability helps shape the sun's long-term 11 year cycle, yet again part of a longer cycle that lasts 22 days. Largely unpredictable, the sun constantly spews highly charged particles known as coronal mass ejections which can severely affect power grids, satellites and even airplane passengers. During its seasonal peaks, however, the sun is much more prone to solar storms, so understanding how this cyclic variability happens is key to averting a potential disaster.
When it comes to alien life, we’ve had our hopes crushed time and time again. As the Moon was being observed with telescopes in medieval times, many thought it might be inhabited, but then we learned there’s not atmosphere and no water on it. Then Venus, our sister planet turned out to be completely unsuitable for life, […]
Dr. Milton Wainwright is trying to convince the world that the found alien life floating some 25 miles in our planet’s atmosphere – but while tabloids gobbled up his story like no tomorrow, the scientific community is much more reluctant to accept his results. Is there any truth to these claims? Let’s have a look. If […]
According to Einstein's theory of relativity, if one galaxy is located directly behind another, then the front one would bend the light of the more distant one, in such a way that you'd only see the behind one as a ring. Less than 100 years ago, many researchers thought we'd never see one, but astronomers have managed to take several pictures that confirm it - as is the example you see below.
Eight colonies of common ants were shipped to the International Space Station last December to study how microgravity might affect the creatures. So, how did the ants fare? Well, surprisingly good actually. The dexterous ants clung to the surface of the station and migrated freely (under supervision of course) despite weightlessness. Of course, their movements weren't as coordinated as on Earth and since they rely on a sort of hive mind to coordinate the colony, researchers believe studying their mishaps in microgravity might aid in building better robots.
It almost sounds too cheesy to be true: NASA wants to send a shuttle to an asteroid, pluck a piece of it, then make it return to the Moon and orbit it. Then, brave astronauts will go and retrieve the sample, bringing it back to Earth for study. But that's exactly what astronomers and engineers at the space agency want to do.
When you gotta eat... well you gotta eat, even in space. On March 23, 1965 astronaut John Young launched to Earths' orbit aboard the Gemini 3. With him was crewmate Gus Grissom and a two days old corn beef sandwich, smuggled without permission on the spacecraft.
A chance discovery has provided experimental evidence that stars may generate sound. While he was examining the interaction of an ultra-intense laser with a plasma target, John Parsley from the University of York found that interfering plasma generates a series of pressure pulses - in other words, sounds.
A new shocking theory suggests that Jupiter may have sweeped through our solar system much like a wrecking ball, knocking planets out of the solar system our moving them outwards, to the position we see them in today. If this is true, then it might explain why our solar system is a rarity and why life emerged the way it did.
A shocking image went viral a few days ago, with an 11th-century French abbey completely surrounded by water following a super tide. Naturally, many similar photos followed, and many "explanations" emerged, most vaguely referencing the solar eclipse, something about gravitational cycles, and some even stated it was caused by the "tide of the century", although the "tide of the century" comes by every 18 years. So let's take a look at what actually happened.
Everything is made of stardust - but some things are made of more stardust than others. A new study has found that a single supernova is capable of producing large enough quantities of dust to create thousands of planets like Earth.
With spring starting to settle in, snow is likely the last thing on people's minds - but NASA is taking snow really seriously. They want to put satellites in orbit to understand how the frozen lands in the polar areas are developing and adapting to climate change.
Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon, is no stranger to staggering photos. His most famous shot includes the first ever selfie in space. Now, while visiting Stonehenge, Aldrin posted on Twitter a photo of him sporting a t-shirt with a stylized Mars logo a la NASA, which read "Get your ass to Mars". A long time supporter of inter-planetary exploration, both publicly during his numerous TV appearances or press editorials and institutionally during his stints in front of Congress, this latest publicity shot aims to inspire the public and garner support for a manned mission to Mars.
They're considered a hybrid between asteroids and comets, but still, they're called minor planets; they also bear the name of the fabled man-horse creatures in Greek mythology - centaurs. Now, scientists have found that a Centaur in our solar system, Chiron, might have rings just like those of Saturn.
According to Danish and Australian researchers, there are billions of the stars in the Milky Way located in the "habitable zone", where liquid water might exist, and with it, life as we know it.
A pair of coronal mass ejections (CMEs) emitted by the sun last Sunday have now triggered a severe geomagnetic storm around the globe. At first, only a mild geomagnetic storm was registered after the first wave hit our planet's magnetosphere. Quickly, however, the storm has intensified to G4 status, or only one notch below the highest level solar storm, according to the NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center. This is the most severe solar storm of the current solar cycle.
The Moon's geologic past was much more interesting and active than previously thought, results from the Chinese lunar rover indicate. The Yutu moon rover found evidence of at least nine distinct rock layers deep beneath its wheels, something which seems to indicate a more complex setting.
NASA has announced its plans to implement smart glasses in their future missions. The space agency will work together with Osterhout Design Group (ODG) in order to develop the technology which will be used for virtual reality and augmented reality applications during human spaceflight, including repairs and other technical tasks.
Extraterrestrial life in our solar system just got a lot more likely: NASA has found convincing evidence that Ganymede and Enceladus, moons of Jupiter and Saturn respectively, might both harbor salty oceans beneath their frozen surface. Scientists estimate that the oceans are over 50 miles thick (80 km), which greatly increases the chances of alien life.
It is generally accepted that our galaxy has a diameter of nearly 100,000 light-years. However, findings of a new research, published in the Astrophysical Journal, suggest that the Milky Way may actually be 50% larger than previously thought. The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy containing our solar system. From Earth, the Milky Way appears as a […]
Using high sensitivity radar telescopes, astronomers have managed to take a glimpse at the surface of Venus, piercing through its thick clouds.
At the core of a newly found dwarf galaxy, astronomers discovered a mysterious source of gamma rays that may signal the presence of the mysterious dark matter. If this is confirmed, then it would be the first time we see dark matter through anything else than its gravitational pull.
Exoplanet GJ581d is the first potentially habitable world astronomers have discovered, but some astronomers believed that the planet wasn't actually there - it was all an observational flaw mixed with some noise in the signal. However, British researchers recently released a study which confirms that the planet does exist and further underline the matter of habitability. This is one of the planets outside our solar system most likely to harbor life.
Astronomers have discovered a star racing at a incredible pace of 2.6 million miles an hour (4.2 million kilometers an hour), making it the fastest moving star discovered thus far. It's so fast that it should exit our galaxy and turn into an intergalactic rogue. It doesn't stop here. Such celestial oddities are believed to be spurred in motion by the extreme gravitational tugs found in the vecinity of supermassive black holes, such as the one found at the core of the Milky Way. The new found road runner, however, was most likely flung outward by a Type Ia supernova, one of the most powerful and brightest bursts of energy in the universe. Little is know about such stellar explosions, and the hypervelocity star might submit some valuable clues.
Neil deGrasse Tyson, the internet's favorite astrophysicist doesn't have high hopes for Mars One - the private enterprise that plans to send people on a one way trip to Mars. Mars One, plans to create a Martian outpost with a crew to land in 2024, sending people 2 by 2; they recently announced the 100 finalists to be the first Martian astronauts.
Scientists have found tantalizing evidence regarding Mars' wet past - according to new research, the Red Planet may have once had a huge ocean, containing 5 million cubic miles of water with a depth of over a mile.
