A team of European astronomers announced today a remarkable breakthrough in the field of extra-solar planets. Using the HARPS (High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher) instrument at the ESO La Silla Observatory in the Atacama desert in Chile, they have found a triple system of super-Earths around the star HD 40307. Moreover, looking at their [...]
Latest Space News
Phoenix Mission Extended, Water Confirmed on Mars
Laboratory tests aboard NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander have identified water in a soil sample. The lander’s robotic arm delivered the sample Wednesday to an instrument that identifies vapors produced by the heating of samples. “We have water,” said William Boynton of the University of Arizona, lead scientist for the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer, or TEGA. [...]
Cassini Confirms Liquid Lake on Saturn Moon Titan
Scientists have confirmed that at least one body in...
Water Discovered On the Moon, Not Entirely Vaporized, Scientists Say
Washington, D.C. Using new techniques, scientists have discovered for...
NASA's New Eye in the Sky to Watch Weather
The latest oceanography satellite is circling Earth today after...
Phoenix Lander Unearths Hidden Ice on Mars, Vaporized Shortly
Dice-size crumbs of bright material have vanished from inside...
Recent Space News :
The Space Shuttle Discovery and her crew of seven astronauts flew home this morning to a picture-perfect landing at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. Their return to Earth ended the latest construction mission to the International Space Station. Commander Mark Kelly and Pilot Ken Ham were at the controls of Discovery as [...]
Space shuttle Discovery and its seven-member crew lifted off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at 5:02 p.m. EDT Saturday to deliver and install a Japanese laboratory on the International Space Station. The mission, designated STS-124, is the second of three flights to launch components to complete the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Kibo laboratory. Discovery is [...]
Commander Mark Kelly crawled inside space shuttle Discovery and climbed up to his seat on the left side of the cockpit as the STS-124 crew began taking their places for launch. It will take a little while for the six men and one woman to get into place before the hatch is closed and locked [...]
NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander is on the Red Planet’s surface. Touchdown was confirmed shortly before 7:00 (CDT) Sunday evening. Two hours later, the probe sent back its first raw images from the surface of the northern pole of Mars. The new images can be viewed here. The spacecraft took about eight minutes to land after [...]
NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander is on the Red Planet’s surface. Touchdown was confirmed shortly before 7:00 (CDT) Sunday evening, with the first photos from the probe expected to be received within hours. The spacecraft took about eight minutes to land after entering the Martian atmosphere. Hours before the anticipated landing, Phoenix Principal Investigator Peter Smith, [...]
Interacting galaxies are found throughout the Universe, sometimes as dramatic collisions that trigger bursts of star formation, on other occasions as stealthy mergers that result in new galaxies. A series of 59 new images of colliding galaxies has been released from the several terabytes of archived raw images from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to [...]
Astronomers have spied a faraway star system that is so unusual, it was one of a kind — until its discovery helped them pinpoint a second one that was much closer to home. In a paper published in a recent issue of the Astrophysical Journal Letters, Ohio State University astronomers and their colleagues suggest that [...]