Browsing: NASA

Heralded by NASA as the best meteor shower of the year, the annual Geminid skyline spectacle is set to peak tonight, part of a show that shouldn’t be missed. Passionate night gazers, however, will have to battle low temperatures and a bright sky, lit by the passing full moon. The  Geminids are expected to streak across […]

Since NASA retired its space shuttle program this summer, the space agency has been left with no viable means of transporting astronauts to and from the International Space Station. As such, NASA is currently dependent on Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft to fulfill this duty, whose services come at a hefty cost. Today, NASA announced that the […]

This summer Japan was hit by a tremendous 9.0 Richter scale earthquake, which generated one of the most powerful tsunamis in recorded history. The event killed thousands, left countless others homeless, caused major damage to the Fukushima nuclear power plant , which lead to  radiation leakage and more than $130 bln in damage. Now, new details […]

Every NASA spacecraft sent to missions on other space bodies, like other planets, asteroids or moons, needs to adhere to a strict internal protoocl which needs to ensure that no biological contamination is brought in from Earth. This is a vital preparatory step before the launch of a spacecraft, especially if the later in cause […]

On November 26, after countless delays, budget overruns and buckets of sweat, humankind’s most capable machine of landing on and traveling through the red planet will finally touch base and launch towards its ambitious destination. The Curiosity rover‘s lift off is currently scheduled for 10:02 a.m. EST, this Saturday. Also known as the Mars Science Laboratory […]

The ever faithful Hubble telescope has offered us yet another fantastic glimpse into the Universe’s hidden gems. Captioned below is the NGC 1846 globular cluster, which lies 160,000 light-years away in the constellation Doradus. The cluster is actually the product of the Large Magellanic Cloud, which neighbors our own Milky Way. Check out this very large, […]

Two weeks ago, panic engulfed the Russian space agency after one of its dearest project, the  $170 million Phobos-Grunt mission, which was set to land on Mars’ moon Phobos, collect samples and then return to moon, got stranded in orbit, completely blocked off from any kind of communication. Valiant efforts were made to restore the craft, […]

This year, mankind celebrated 50 years of space exploration since Yuri Gagarin‘s pioneering flight around Earth’s orbit, however the American Museum of Natural History  is more concerned to set its eyes towards future, once with the opening of its new “Beyond Planet Earth” exhibit, which features tomorrow’s space age wonders, as well as relics from the […]

Yesterday, NASA held a press briefing where scientists involved in a recently published study, of intense consequences to the scientific community, and people looking for signs of extraterestrial life alike, discussed how Jupiter’s icy satellite has great chances of fostering life in the warm oceans beneath its surface. Europa’s surface is covered in a […]

Europa, the icy satellite of Jupiter, is covered in a thick crust of scarred and cross-hatched ice. Missions to Europa, which is comparable in size to Earth’s own moon, by NASA‘s Galileo spacecraft have brought back measurements which indicate the crust is tens of kilometers thick, however under it lies a warm ocean as far as […]