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Last week at the latest TEDGlobal conference in Oxford, astronomer Dimitar Sassilov, professor of astronomy at Harvard University and a distinguished member of the Kepler space telescope science team, unveiled some incredible results gathered by our eyes and ears in the galaxy. Kepler’s most recent reported downloaded conferred some incredible statistics, among which most importantly the discovery of: […]
The above photo was captured by the Hubble Space Telescope around mid last year, proving excellent practice for Hubble’s newly installed Wide Field Camera 3. Captioned is the by now famous NGC 3603 nebula, located in the Carina spiral arm – it’s by far one of the most spectacular star forming regions in the Milky […]
While America seems to have delayed it’s Moon base ambitions, Japan seems to have no such plans; according to their own statements, they have absolutely no intention of letting perfectly good lunar lands go to waste. An ambitious plan of (just?) $2.2 billion investments is in the works at JAXA (Japan’s space agency), with the […]
Barack Obama came out and said that it should be possible for NASA to send astronauts to Mars and bring them back safely by the mid 2030s. The US president said this while explaining the details of his plans with the US space agency at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Mister Obama has set […]
Two years ago, researchers reported the strange movement of hundreds of galaxy clusters moving in the same direction at about 3.6 million kilometers per hour. Current spatial movement models can’t explain this in any way, so at the time, they launched a strange hypothesis: clusters are being tugged by the gravity of something outside our […]
NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity is already in its 7th year on Mars, and over the years it provided some quite useful information; researchers from NASA have been constantly working on ways to improve and optimize it by constantly uploading new software. Such is the case with the software they applied this winter, which makes […]
At nearly 200 meters below the ice, there is no light, the temperature is way below 0 degrees, and scientists were expecting to find nothing more than a handful of microbes – and for good reason. So it’s easy to understand why they were so surprised to find not a single (evolved) life form, but […]
The Planet Researchers have long been interested in finding other planets that have approximately the same size as our mother earth, because it’s estimated that they have the biggest odds of hosting life in a significant diversity. However, out of the over 400 planets that have been discovered so far, the vast majority resembles Jupiter […]
As I was writing in a previous post, Titan is quite unique, in that aside from our planet it’s the only place in our solar system where significant quantities of liquid are to be found (though most are liquid ethane and methane). That doesn’t seem to make much of a difference considering the chemistry of […]
Mike Massimino hit the news in May as the first to “Tweet” in space. He began “tweeting” under the name “Astro Mike” while training for the STS-125 mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope. Soon nearly 250,000 people were following his Twitter feed. The reality is that Massimino probably wasn’t really “tweeting” at all, at […]
Stormy weather conditions may delay the launch of space shuttle Endeavour, currently scheduled for liftoff on Saturday, July 11. This comes on the heels of two delays last month caused by a hydrogen gas leak. A similar problem delayed the launch of space shuttle Discovery in March. The 16-day mission will feature a number of […]
NASA’s immediate future will likely have an emphasis on Earth science, using the International Space Station for research and development, and making space exploration more of an entrepreneurial venture. Those were the main themes touched on during the Senate confirmation hearing of Charles Bolden, President Obama’s nominee for NASA chief. When discussing space entrepreneurship, Bolden […]
The ball aproaches the field and… touchdown! NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander survived the fiery dive into Mars’ atmosphere Sunday to make a three-point landing in the planet’s arctic regions. This is absolutely a fantastic achievement which included an impressive amount of work and so many people that struggled for this common magnificent objective. “It looks […]
