After a journey of more than 2.2 billion miles and three and a half years, NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft made its first flyby of Mercury just after 2 PM Eastern Standard Time on January 14, 2008. All seven scientific instruments worked flawlessly, producing a stream of surprises that is amazing and delighting the science team. The [...]
Latest Space News
Spiral Galaxy Has an Explosive Secret
NGC 2397, pictured in this image from Hubble, is a classic spiral galaxy with long prominent dust lanes along the edges of its arms, seen as dark patches and streaks silhouetted against the starlight. Hubble’s exquisite resolution allows the study of individual stars in nearby galaxies. Located nearly 60 million light-years away from Earth, the [...]
Finding Cellulose Microfibers on Mars
Looking for evidence of life on Mars or other...
Earth Hour 2009 Countdown Already Underway
If you missed out taking part in Earth Hour...
New Aerospace Firm Plans Commercial Space Flights within Two Years
A small California aerospace company today unveiled a new...
Shuttle Endeavour Crew Homeward Bound
The crew of the space shuttle Endeavour is almost...
Recent Space News :
For the first time ever, NASA will beam a song — The Beatles’ “Across the Universe” — directly into deep space at 7 p.m. EST on Feb. 4. The transmission over NASA’s Deep Space Network will commemorate the 40th anniversary of the day The Beatles recorded the song, as well as the 50th anniversary of [...]
Just over one month after hailing its moon mission a success, China announces big plans for space exploration in 2008. State media in Beijing report that the country will launch its third manned space mission (Shenzhou VII) featuring its first space walk, later this year. The plans also include sending up more than a dozen [...]
It barreled by Earth more than a month ago, and now a recently discovered asteroid is headed toward Mars. NASA’s Near-Earth Object Office, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, is monitoring the trajectory of the asteroid, which is estimated to be 164-feet wide. Its current course has astromoners predicting a very close passage [...]
New research brings scientists closer to exploring ice-covered ocean and potential for life on one of Jupiter’s moons. Jupiter’s moon Europa is just as far away as ever, but new research is bringing scientists closer to being able to explore its tantalizing ice-covered ocean and determine its potential for harboring life. “We’ve learned a lot [...]
No Go for Shuttle Until Sunday
posted in SpaceDecember 9th is circled on NASA’s calendar as the target launch date for the space shuttle Atlantis. It’s hoped the orbiter will reach for the stars at 3:21 p.m. EST on Sunday. For the moment, Atlantis is sitting on the launchpad at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The shuttle had been scheduled [...]
One of the fastest moving stars ever seen has been discovered with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. This cosmic cannonball is challenging theories to explain its blistering speed. Astronomers used Chandra to observe a neutron star, known as RX J0822-4300, over a period of about five years. During that span, three Chandra observations clearly show the [...]
Astronomers have used Hubble’s powerful resolution to study Comet Holmes’ core for clues about how the comet brightened. The orbiting observatory’s Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) monitored the comet for several days, snapping images on 29 Oct., 31 Oct. and 4 Nov. Hubble’s crisp “eye†can see details as small as 54 kilometres across, [...]