Browsing: NASA

While America seems to have delayed it’s Moon base ambitions, Japan seems to have no such plans; according to their own statements, they have absolutely no intention of letting perfectly good lunar lands go to waste. An ambitious plan of (just?) $2.2 billion investments is in the works at JAXA (Japan’s space agency), with the […]

Barack Obama came out and said that it should be possible for NASA to send astronauts to Mars and bring them back safely by the mid 2030s. The US president said this while explaining the details of his plans with the US space agency at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Mister Obama has set […]

Two years ago, researchers reported the strange movement of hundreds of galaxy clusters moving in the same direction at about 3.6 million kilometers per hour. Current spatial movement models can’t explain this in any way, so at the time, they launched a strange hypothesis: clusters are being tugged by the gravity of something outside our […]

NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity is already in its 7th year on Mars, and over the years it provided some quite useful information; researchers from NASA have been constantly working on ways to improve and optimize it by constantly uploading new software. Such is the case with the software they applied this winter, which makes […]

At nearly 200 meters below the ice, there is no light, the temperature is way below 0 degrees, and scientists were expecting to find nothing more than a handful of microbes – and for good reason. So it’s easy to understand why they were so surprised to find not a single (evolved) life form, but […]

Employing the help of the Mini-SAR instrument (a lightweight, synthetic aperture radar), NASA managed to find more than 40 craters covered with ice. Despite the fact that the craters are relatively small, it’s estimated that there is about 600 million metric tons in that area. “The emerging picture from the multiple measurements and resulting data […]

It’s NASA’s second launch in just 4 days (after Endeavour), and this time it’s about the most advanced solar observatory ever built. It was first placed on a shuttle station complex and it was orbiting the Atlantic when it was rocketed into space in an unmaned rocket. The Solar Dynamics Observatory (as it was named) […]

The Planet Researchers have long been interested in finding other planets that have approximately the same size as our mother earth, because it’s estimated that they have the biggest odds of hosting life in a significant diversity. However, out of the over 400 planets that have been discovered so far, the vast majority resembles Jupiter […]

As I was writing in a previous post, Titan is quite unique, in that aside from our planet it’s the only place in our solar system where significant quantities of liquid are to be found (though most are liquid ethane and methane). That doesn’t seem to make much of a difference considering the chemistry of […]

Mike Massimino hit the news in May as the first to “Tweet” in space. He began “tweeting” under the name “Astro Mike” while training for the STS-125 mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope. Soon nearly 250,000 people were following his Twitter feed. The reality is that Massimino probably wasn’t really “tweeting” at all, at […]