Browsing: N.A.S.A.

This Wednesday morning, Andrew Feustel and Mike Fincke floated out on a spectacular 6 hour long spacewalk outside the International Space Station – the third spacewalk since Endeavour launched into space for its last mission before retirement. “It’s great to be back outside. It’s the most beautiful planet in the universe,” said Fincke as he […]

How’s your Mandarin? If it’s as rusty as mine, we’d do best and brush up on it since it seems we’re heading towards an age of Chinese domination. Capitalizing on its tremendous financial growth, China has some incredible programs which officials hope to catapult the people’s republic in front of the new space age. A […]

Exactly 30 years ago, the first orbital space shuttle launch took place, marking the start of a slew of successful missions, with 135 successful launches, which provided important insights in space exploration, offered satellite deployment, space lab work and indispensable International Space Station service. The shuttle program however will be permanently retired soon, with only […]

Once again NASA‘s amazing “astronomy picture of the day” feature provides us with pure gold. The above captioned stunning photo (click on it and you’ll understand it’s splendor) was shot by astrophotographer Juan Carlos Casado during a clear night sky – the fully 360 across panorama was imaged by superimposing 9 separate photographs. This how […]

Remarkably, a growing issue NASA scientists face everyday is space junk – tiny bits of scrap, bolts, rocket modules from launches and so on. All of them along the years have amassed to a point where it is now very dangerous for satellites, orbiting spacecrafts and especially the International Space Station to freely orbit Earth. […]

As a somewhat interesting story, I’ve just read on SpaceWeather that the new sub-orbital pseudo-shuttle military space plane, the X-37B, has been spotted on the sky by various astronomers around the US as its surface shined above the stratosphere. I’ve tried to inquire and find out what’s the purpose of the X-37B’s just recent circling […]

There’s nothing Russian about the above fantastic featured photo, but what one can be pretty certain about is that it’s darn right fantastic! Dubbed the “red square nebula”, the phenomena was observed after infrared exposures from Earth-based telescopes in Hawaii and California were superimposed revealing a fantastic geometry. Scientists are still not sure how the […]

A successful manned mission to Mars would launch mankind into a new space era,  marking a historical moment; and however distant this prospect may be, scientists at NASA are already working on space suits tailored for the Martian environment. The NDX-1 space suit, designed by Argentine aerospace engineer Pablo de Leon with NASA funding, was […]

Astronomers usually classify stellar objects by a spectra going from hotter to cooler, using the letters O, B, A, F, G, K, and M. As observational technology progressed and a myriad of new astronomical findings were made, in the last 15 years alone two new classes  L and T emerged designed to describe ultracool brown […]

In a time when a thing called the space race was in full swing, technological advance and cocky egos made a lot of people, mostly scientists, get disillusioned with visions of grander for the future.  In the 1970’s Princeton physicist Gerard O’Neill with the help of NASA’s Ames Research Center and Stanford University showed that we can […]