Astronomy, Space | featured news

NASA details plans to pluck rock off asteroid, explore it

NASA is aiming to launch a rocket to an asteroid in five years and grab a boulder off of it — a stepping stone for an eventual trip sending humans to Mars.

Senh: I'm more in favor of grabbing the entire asteroid with a giant bag option. No, I didn't make that up; it was the other cheaper option.

 

Russia charging NASA $70 million per rocket seat

NASA is blaming Congress for the need to pay $424 million more to Russia to get U.S. astronauts into space.

 

One flight closer to space tourism

Virgin Galactic - CNN

Virgin Galactic is one flight closer to becoming a commercial "spaceline." The company's passenger spacecraft, SpaceShipTwo, completed its first rocket-powered flight Monday morning above the Mojave Desert in California.

 

Video: Would you take 1-way trip to Mars?

A Dutch company is now accepting applications for brave men and women who would like to go to Mars.

 

Herschel captures a 'cosmic horse'

Horsehead Nebula - BBC

Europe's Herschel space telescope has imaged one of the most popular subjects in the sky - the Horsehead Nebula - and its environs. The distinctively shaped molecular gas cloud is sited some 1,300 light-years from Earth in the Constellation Orion.

 

Mars vs. Europa: Are we looking in the wrong place for alien life?

Mars, Europa - NBC News

A British astrobiology conference has revived a years-old debate over the best place to look for life elsewhere in the solar system: Mars, or the moons of Jupiter and Saturn? "For reasons I don't really understand, the wider solar system and the potential for life there has not been high priority," The Telegraph quoted Robert Pappalardo, a senior research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, as saying on BBC Radio 4.

 

NASA: Mars missing most of its atmosphere

NASA's Curiosity rover results confirm that Mars has lost most of its atmosphere, on its way to becoming a cold, dry planet. In experimental results reported Monday at a European geoscience meeting in Vienna, Austria, a look at the Martian air by the $2.5 billion rover finds evidence that as much as 90% of the original atmosphere there has dissipated into space over the planet's lifetime. "It was still red, but it means that Mars once was a warmer, wetter world," says rover team scientist Sushil Atreya of the University of Michigan. "It was also a more habitable world, essentially four billion years ago."

 

Senator: NASA to lasso asteroid, bring it closer

NASA is planning for a robotic spaceship to lasso a small asteroid and park it near the moon for astronauts to explore, a top senator revealed Friday.

 

NASA's Voyager 'appears' to have left solar system: study

Voyager 1 - AFP

More than 35 years after it launched on a mission to explore the cosmos, NASA's unmanned Voyager spacecraft appears to have left the solar system and is in a "new region" of space, said a study Wednesday.

 

Mars Rover Shows Planet Could Have Supported Life

Martian Rock Sample

NASA scientists say tests on a Mars rock show the planet could have supported primitive life. The analysis was done by the rover Curiosity, which drilled into the rock, crushed it and tested a tiny sample. The rover was the first spacecraft sent to Mars that could collect a sample from deep inside a rock.

 

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