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Struggling through a welter of controversy, the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration this week announced plans for a new deep space exploration program. At the heart of the Space Launch System is development of an advanced heavy-lift launch vehicle that will enable human exploration in...
In a few short weeks, the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, will award a $500,000 grant for a 100-year starship project. The grant will be awarded at the 100 Year Starship Study Symposium, which will be held in Orlando, Fla., Sept. 30 through Oct. 2. The symposium wi...
With the weather barely permitting, the U.S. space exploration program reached another milestone on Friday: Atlantis blasted off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center on what will be the final space shuttle mission. The flight caps 30 years of achievements including the construction of the International ...
It's difficult enough for most humans to grasp the idea that our planet is just one of countless others in our galaxy -- and a pretty small one, at that. Then, of course, there's the concept that our galaxy is just one of billions of others in the universe -- sure to compound any confusion considera...
Planetariums may date back to the far reaches of recorded time, but the first widely known example -- an ancient cast-metal globe made by Archimedes to predict the movements of the planets -- now seems to have little in common with the technological marvels that have become widespread today. Rather ...
Few ideas convey the mystery and awe-inspiring nature of space better than the black hole. Dark, vast and little understood, black holes in many ways represent all that we still don't know about the universe. With their seemingly infinite emptiness and general unexplorability, they're also more than...
Roaming planets, untied to a solar system or stellar orbit, were recently found by a team of astronomers, according to a report in Nature. The team of researchers led by David Bennett from Notre Dame University and Takahiro Sumi of Osaka University used gravitational microlensing observing programs ...
At 8:56 a.m. EDT Monday morning, 19 years after its first launch on May 7, 1992, the space shuttle Endeavour left NASA's Kennedy Space Center for its 25th and final flight. This is also the second-to-last shuttle mission for NASA, which is sunsetting the program due to budget cuts. The very last shu...
A mysterious cosmic blast in the constellation Draco has astronomers scrambling to try to understand its cause, so unlike is it to anything ever observed before. Rather than the short-lived gamma-ray bursts typically associated with the death of a massive star -- most last no more than a few hours -...
NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft on Tuesday and Wednesday captured and delivered to Earth the first photographs of Mercury ever taken from within the planet's orbit. Taken at 5:20 am EDT Tuesday, the historic first photo was soon joined by 364 more of the solar system's innermost planet, and several of t...
A brown dwarf is A) a tepid spot of tea; B) a tiny cup of java; or C) a star with so little energy its temperature isn't much different from a cup of coffee or tea. The correct answer -- C -- describes a newly discovered, lukewarm star about 75 light years -- 709,539,630,000,000 kilometers or 440,88...
In a first-time ever maneuver, NASA's MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging space probe -- aka "Messenger" -- entered Mercury's orbit Thursday. The sun's closest planetary neighbor, Mercury is hot and harsh, presenting conditions no human astronaut could endure. Messenger, ho...
The National Research Council is recommending planetary science missions for the decade 2013-2022 that could provide important new clues about our solar system. After sorting out budget issues, five expert panels selected research priorities through a rigorous review that included input from planeta...
A controversial, game-changing claim published in a journal with a reputation some consider sketchy has the scientific community both praising and damning the reported discovery: fossils of bacteria embedded in meteorites from outer space. "Scanning Electron Microscopy investigations of the interna...
A second high-profile failure in two days has helped make a bona-fide rough week for NASA. The U.S. space agency's Glory atmospheric research mission satellite crashed into the Pacific Ocean Friday, one day after a faulty o-ring caused a space suit leak on board the Shuttle Discovery. A so-called "...
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