New NASA Game: Extreme Planet Makeover, Gliese 581d Edition
Scientists are on the hunt for exo-Earths, distant cousins of our planet that are just the right distance from their
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NASA Identifies Source of Shuttle Discovery's Crack Problem
Image: Jim Grossmann, courtesy of NASAmore>>
With No Reply From NanoSail-D Satellite, NASA Wonders If It Actually Launched at All
Image: NASAmore>>
FYI: How Would NASA Rescue An Astronaut Who Floated Away From The International Space Station?
Image: NASAmore>>
Japanese Venus Probe Misses the Planet, May Get Another Chance In Six Years
Image: Akihiro Ikeshita/JAXAmore>>
NASA's Newly Discovered Arsenic-Loving Bacteria Are Fascinating, but Not Aliens [Updated + Video]
Image courtesy Science/AAASmore>>
27.02.11
NASA Identifies Source of Shuttle Discovery's Crack Problem
The space shuttle could fly its final mission as early as February 24.
After more than two months of delays, NASA said yesterday that space shuttle engineers have diagnosed
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With No Reply From NanoSail-D Satellite, NASA Wonders If It Actually Launched at All
Last week's launch of NanoSail-D - NASA's solar sailing nanosatellite that was reportedly launched from the Fast, Affordable, Science and Technology Satellite
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Five Contests That Recognize The Science Achievements of the Everyman
There's a long tradition of offering big cash prizes to entice talented and creative individuals to solve problems that have stymied industry and governments for decades. For example, in 1810, French cook Nicolas Appert won a 12,000-franc government prize for a food preservation
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FYI: How Would NASA Rescue An Astronaut Who Floated Away From The International Space Station?
It's never happened, and NASA feels confident that it never will. For one thing, astronauts generally don't float free. Outside the ISS, they're always attached to the spacecraft with a braided steel tether, which has a tensile strength of 1,100 pounds. If it's a two-person
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Japanese Venus Probe Misses the Planet, May Get Another Chance In Six Years
A Japanese probe bound for Venus has missed its orbit and been seized by the sun's gravitational pull, in a major setback for Japan's shoestring space program. The probe, called Akatsuki,
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Final Launch of Space Shuttle Discovery Now Delayed Until Feb. 3 At The Earliest
Another day, another piece of bad news for space shuttle Discovery. The aging shuttle will launch on its last mission no earlier than Feb. 3, NASA announced today.
Mission
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NASA's Newly Discovered Arsenic-Loving Bacteria Are Fascinating, but Not Aliens [Updated + Video]
So everyone chill out. It does raise interesting questions for alien life-hunters, however
Biologists have isolated a bacterium that can use a deadly chemical in place of one of life's key building blocks, in a finding NASA says could have major implications for astrobiology
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Blurry Nebula Image Marks Success for Flying Telescope, NASA Says
After months of calibration and testing, NASA's flying telescope made its first excursion this morning, and the space agency is looking forward to analyzing the
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IBM Unveils Nanophotonic Chips that Could Lead the Exascale Computing Revolution
IBM is prepped to lead the way into the next era of exascale computing, at least if the technology they showed off at a convention today in Chiba, Japan can live up to
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With No Reply From NanoSail-D Satellite, NASA Wonders If It Actually Launched at All
Last week's launch of NanoSail-D - NASA's solar sailing nanosatellite that was reportedly launched from the Fast, Affordable, Science and Technology Satellite
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Google Plans to Launch Disruption-Tolerant Internet Into Space This Year
Talk about cloud computing. Google wants to install "InterPlanetary internet protocols" (IP IP?) on spacecraft, using them as an interwoven network of new space-based communication nodes.
That's according Google's Chief Internet Evangelist, Vint Cerf, in an interview
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New Web Tool Shows Exact Effects of Potential Asteroid Impacts
Asteroids and comets come in all shapes and sizes-from small pebbles, to larger SUV-sized fragments, to massive asteroids like Ceres, which has a diameter of about 621 miles. Much of the asteroid material that crosses paths with the Earth burns up when it enters the atmosphere.
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Using Home Astronomy Software, Citizen Scientists Discover New Pulsar
Through the Einstein@Home program, about 250,000 private citizens from 192 countries donate time on their home and office computers to help comb through astronomical data. Now, for the first time, three of those citizen scientists -- Chris and Helen Colvin of Iowa and
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New generation of supersonic jets aims to get rid of the boom
True to its aeronautic roots, NASA is evaluating a new generation of supersonic airplane designs to see whether they can reduce sonic-boom levels.
Boeing
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Hubble Shoots a Spooky Snapshot of a Faraway Haunted Nebula
This spooky image of a tiny nebula known as IRAS 05437+2502 was recently released by the Hubble Space Telescope, but perhaps even more eerie than the wispy, ghost-like appearance
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MIT's Martian Genome Project Will Search for Alien DNA on the Red Planet
When hypothesizing about life that may exist elsewhere in the universe, the tendency is to visualize something far different from life here on earth. But here in our galactic neighborhood, a team of MIT researchers argues, life it just as likely related to us. Following
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In First Test of Interstellar GPS, Team Uses Distant Pulsars to Determine Position in Space
Global Positioning Systems work famously here on the home planet because we control all of the moving parts; put some satellites in the sky, equip a device with the proper hardware to communicate with them, and you can locate yourself just about anywhere. But how would
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Microsoft's Terapixel project creates clearest, biggest night sky map yet, using more than 3,400 telescope photos
First they gave us a high-res tour of Mars -- now Microsoft has made the largest and clearest night-sky map ever. It's a terapixel image: 1,000 000,000,000 pixels.
The software giant's Terapixel
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Now Discovery Has a Fuel Leak; Delayed Another 48 Hours At Least
Perhaps its sentimentality that's making Discovery stall its 39th and final mission. Scheduled to launch at 3:04 p.m. today after four days of delays for reasons ranging from helium and nitrogen leaks to voltage
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New Earth-based telescope system snaps sharpest-ever pics of deep space
The Large Binocular Telescope just got a new pair of eyes, and while we love our orbiting telescopes we have to admit the LBT looks pretty sharp. The Arizona-based telescope just brought home the clearest
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Tandem pair of German orbital imaging satellites will create sharpest-ever 3D map of Earth
A Dnepr rocket lifting off from Kazakhstan has successfully launched the second half of the world's most precise 3D mapping mission of the globe into orbit today, setting in motion a tandem
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JAXA team starts to pry open Hayabusa asteroid-sample capsule, finds whiff of gas
The Hayabusa spacecraft landed in the Australian outback on June 13, after a seven-year space journey. It is the hope of JAXA, Japan's space agency, that the capsule Hayabusa is carrying contains a sample taken from asteroid Itokawa. If so, this will be the first
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Are we living inside a black hole?
Scientists trying to explain the universe's accelerating expansion usually point to dark energy, which seems to be pushing everything apart.
But an Indiana University professor has a new theory, reports New Scientist:
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Violent Star Birth Spawns Serene Snapshot of the Lagoon Nebula
Without a telescope, the Lagoon Nebula is faintly visible with the naked eye as a unremarkable patch of gray in the heart of the Milky Way. Observed up close with the Hubble Space Telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys, it looks slightly
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A Prototype Greenhouse Demonstrates the Future of Farming on the Moon
A portable, collapsible greenhouse inspired in part by a crop-producing system at a South Pole research station could someday provide fresh vegetables and other foods in future manned lunar or Martian outposts. Working in conjunction with private industry, the University
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In Case of Asteroid Threat, Deploy Tug-Sats and Heavy Rockets, Apollo Astronaut Says
As evidenced by NASA's confirmation last week of an asteroid collision observed by Hubble, there are plenty of objects careening around the solar system
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Attention, Supervillains and Climate Engineers: The U.N. May Soon Forbid You To Block Out the Sun
Of all of C. Montgomery Burns's nefarious dealings on The Simpsons, perhaps none sticks in the public consciousness like the time he attempted to use a massive shade to block out the sun (most notably because doing so led to his being shot by a vigilante baby
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Hubble Glimpses the Most Distant Object Ever Seen, A Galaxy 13 Billion Light Years Away
Peering deep into the cosmos with its upgraded infrared camera last year, the Hubble Space Telescope was able to image a very deep region of the universe. Researchers didn't realize it at the time, but after follow-up measurements by the ESO's ground-based Very Large Telescope,
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Again, Space Station Has to Be Moved Out of The Way of Space Junk
It's getting to be real crowded up there. Today, Russian aerospace authorities had to shift the orbit of the International Space Station to get it out of the way of a piece of hurtling debris.
A similar maneuver was planned just a couple of months
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