The Hartley 2 comet has made it to the news recently: first because of the comet’s flyby near Earth and then due to it being visited by the Deep Impact spacecraft. The comet is commonly known as Hartley 2, but … Continue reading
America’s current plans for human space exploration seem horribly slow, considering we won’t leave Earth’s orbit until 2025 and won’t reach Mars until 2035. Worse than that, solar radiation spikes could keep us grounded for decades more. Continue reading
By now you may have heard the report that as many as 1/4 of all the sun-like stars in the Milky Way may have Earth-like worlds. Briefly, astronomers studied 166 stars within 80 light years of Earth, and did a survey of the planets they found orbiting them. Continue reading
The Director of NASA’s Ames Center, Pete Worden has announced an initiative to move space flight to the next level. This plan, dubbed the “Hundred Year Starship,” has received $100,000 from NASA and $1 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Continue reading
Copernicus is one of the largest lunar impact craters on the visible hemisphere of the Moon. It was named after the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus. The crater is estimated to have formed about 800 million years ago during the Copernican … Continue reading
This photo of the unusual stone mesas of the Cydonia region on Mars was taken by the robotic spacecraft called Mars Express. It shows an area about 90 kilometers wide. What most people don’t know is that the region in … Continue reading
The Russian Lunar rover Lunokhod 2 was recently spotted on the Moon’s surface. As shown in the photo below, the black arrow indicates where the tracks begin, while the white one shows the resting place of the rover. The arrows … Continue reading
It’s true! NASA’s space shuttle is controlled by a computer running on only one megabyte of RAM. How is this possible? Since the space shuttle and all its hardware is over 30 years old, so is its computer. The current … Continue reading
NASA is considering the use of inflatable modules for the International Space Station (ISS). This idea has been proposed as early as in the 1960s, but it has never been put to use in space until Bigelow Aerospace took over … Continue reading
An infrared space telescope, called the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) has discovered several dark asteroids close to Earth that could possibly be a threat to our planet. Those asteroids are very dark and reflect less than 10% of the … Continue reading