Space, Nasa | featured news

At 5:28 p.m. Monday, NASA’s Grail spacecraft will crash into the Moon’s shadows. (What would you call the half of the Moon facing away from the Sun?)

A giant asteroid will make a flyby of Earth over the next few days, and armchair astronomers can watch the action live on their computers.

Attention wealthy nations and billionaires: A team of former NASA executives will fly you to the moon in an out-of-this-world commercial venture combining the wizardry of Apollo and the marketing of Apple. For a mere $1.5 billion, the business is offering countries the chance to send two people to the moon and back, either for research or national prestige. And if you are an individual with that kind of money to spare, you too can go the moon for a couple days.

Science editor Alan Boyle's blog: Although NASA's Curiosity rover hasn't yet confirmed the detection of organic compounds on Mars, it's already seeing that the Red Planet's soil contains complex chemicals, including perchlorate.

Just in time for Christmas, scientists have confirmed a vast amount of ice at the north pole - on Mercury, the closest planet to the sun....

NASA and Russia's Roscosmos have named the two men who will spend a year aboard the International Space Station to gather more data about the effects of weightlessness on humans....

This nearly global mosaic of observations made by the Mars Color Imager on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on Nov. 18, 2012, shows a dust storm in Mars' southern hemisphere.

There’s an orphan planet roaming our galactic neighborhood. It’s a globe of gas about the size of Jupiter, astronomers say. And it’s out there by its lonesome, untethered to any star, drifting about 100 light-years from Earth. (In astronomical terms, that’s close.)

Radiation levels at the Martian surface appear to be roughly similar to those experienced by astronauts in low-Earth orbit, NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has found. The rover's initial radiation measurements — the first ever taken on the surface of another planet — may buoy the hopes of human explorers who may one day put boots on Mars, for they add more support to the notion that astronauts can indeed function on the Red Planet for limited stretches of time.

Wow, what a view of the Curiosity rover! This is a self-portrait mosaic made from brand new images taken by the MAHLI (Mars Hand Lens Imager), the high-resolution camera located on the turret at the end of MSL’s robotic arm. The arm was moved for each of the 55 images in this mosaic, so the arm doesn’t show up in the mosaic. This montage was put together by Stuart Atkinson, and he notes that these images are just the low-res thumbnail images that have just been sent to Earth. “Imagine what the hi-res version will look like!!” Stu said.