The first commercial supply mission to the International Space Station lifted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 3:34 EDT this morning in what appeared to be a picture-perfect launch through a one-second launch window.
This mission is a demonstration flight by the private company Space...
May
22
NASA‘s Kepler spacecraft is discovering a veritable avalanche of alien worlds. As the numbers mount, it seems to be just a matter of time before Kepler finds what astronomers are really looking for: an Earth-like planet orbiting its star in the ‘Goldilocks...
Apr
11
TED Fellow Lucianne Walkowicz asks: How often do you see the true beauty of the night sky? At TEDxPhoenix, she shows how light pollution is ruining the extraordinary — and often ignored — experience of seeing directly into space.
Walkowicz explains the importance of preserving our dark...
Mar
06
Just when exoplanets became too numerous to bother counting, astrophysicists have discovered a new type of extrasolar planet — a steamy waterworld shrouded in a thick atmosphere. The planet, known as GJ1214b, has a diameter roughly 2.7 times that of Earth and a surface temperature of about...
Feb
21
Just as we add an extra day each Leap Year to account for the difference between our 365-day calendar and the actual time it takes Earth to revolve around the Sun, an occasional Leap Second is needed to keep the world’s clocks in sync with Earth’s rotation about its axis.
Eternal Clock....
Jan
20
Russia’s ill-fated Phobos-Grunt spacecraft fell from orbit on Sunday, although there was some confusion as to where any fragments surviving reentry may have landed.
Russia’s Aerospace Defence Forces reported that debris from the 14-ton craft landed in the southern Pacific ocean, in a...
Jan
15
The super massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, known as Sagittarius A star (Sgr A*), is anxiously reeling in its next, big meal — a large cloud of hydrogen and helium three times more massive than the Earth.
Simulation of gas cloud after close approach to the black hole at the...
Dec
14
Puppis-A Supernova Remnant (click to enlarge). Source: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA
NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) recently captured this image of Puppis A, a supernova remnant roughly 10 light-years in diameter and about 7,000 light years from Earth.
The red, rose-like cloud...
Dec
11
