Sample return is something of a holy grail to planetary explorers. The advantage is that age dating and extensive compositional analysis can be done better with modern instruments in Earth-based laboratories than on miniaturized instruments that have to prepared years in advance for space flight. Continue reading
The following infographic shows how the Antimatter-Hunting Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer works. It was sent to the International Space Station in the STS-134 mission by the Space Shuttle Endeavour on May 16th 2011. The shuttle landed back on Earth on June … Continue reading
About one in 10 rocky planets around stars like our Sun may host a moon proportionally as large as Earth’s, researchers say. Our Moon is disproportionately large – more than a quarter of Earth’s diameter – a situation once thought to be rare. Continue reading
Making your own spaceplane from scratch is obviously not an easy task, which is why we’re not all going to the moon on weekends. Reaction Engines is taking it seriously, though, and their Skylon spaceplane concept has just passed a technical review by the European Space Agency, moving it one step closer to reality. Continue reading
Astronomers say they have found a previously inconceivable phenomenon: planets that do not appear to be anchored to a host star but instead wander the heavens unbound. In a two-year scan of the cosmos, 10 planets with roughly the mass of Jupiter, have been found… Continue reading
In fifty years of spaceflight, only 285 piloted spaceships were launched, carrying 1,154 travellers. Since some of them flew more than once, only 515 human beings have flown in space. And only two dozen Americans ventured beyond Earth orbit, up to the Moon, twelve of them having walked on it. Continue reading
It might look like an abstract painting, but this splash of colors is in fact a busy star-forming complex called Rho Ophiuchi. NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Explorer, or WISE, captured the picturesque image of the region, which is one of the closest star-forming complexes to Earth. Continue reading
Like the Moon, Mercury is also airless. Once its bulk density was determined I became less scientifically interested in it. Density is an important piece of data for modeling the evolution of the solar system. Continue reading
This is one of the best photos of Mars ever taken from Earth or Low Earth Orbit. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope took this close-up of the red planet Mars when it was just 88 million kilometers away. This color image was assembled from a series of exposures taken within 36 hours of the Mars closest approach… Continue reading
A team of scientists led by NASA space scientist James Mason have proposed the idea of using a mid-powered laser and telescope to nudge pieces of space junk out of the way and slow it down to avoid collisions. Continue reading