Space, Nasa | featured news

Nasa has provided almost 300 thumbnails from a sequence of pictures that will eventually be run together as a colour hi-def movie. Visible in the timelapse is the heatshield discarded by the vehicle as it neared the ground. So too is the dust kicked up by the rover's rocket-powered crane. It was the crane that finally settled the robot on to the surface.

The most high-tech rover NASA has ever designed landed safely on Mars early Monday, after a 352-million-mile journey and a harrowing plunge through the planet's atmosphere dubbed “7 Minutes of Terror.” Beforehand, with Curiosity on autopilot, engineers became spectators, anxiously waiting to see if Curiosity executed the routine as planned. "I'm not the nervous type, but I haven't been sleeping all that well the last week or so even though I'm still very confident," said engineer Steven Lee.

After an 8 1/2-month voyage through space, NASA's souped-up Mars spacecraft zoomed toward the red planet for what the agency hopes will be an epic touchdown. The fiery punch through the tenuous Martian atmosphere at 13,000 mph Sunday night marks the beginning of "seven minutes of terror" as the Curiosity rover aims for a bull's-eye landing inside a massive crater near the equator.

Through a labyrinth of hallways deep inside a 1960s-era building that has housed research that dates back to the early years of U.S. space travel, a group of scientists in white coats is stirring, mixing, measuring, brushing and, most important, tasting the end result of their cooking.

On Aug. 5, as nervous JPL engineers watch, the fate of the rover — capable of pulverizing rocks and ingesting soil — will rest on a landing sequence so far-fetched that some scientists were skeptical it could work.

NASA is poised to launch its latest X-ray space telescope on a two-year hunt for hard-to-see objects lurking in the heart of the Milky Way and other galaxies.

Less than a year after NASA ended its shuttle program, players in America's space business are casting around for new direction.

Firing on all engines, NASA's latest rover to Mars executed a course adjustment Wednesday that put it on track for a landing in August.

The most Earth-like planet ever discovered is circling a star 600 light years away, a key finding in an ongoing quest to learn if life exists beyond Earth, scientists said on Monday. "We are homing in on the true Earth-sized, habitable planets," said San Jose State University astronomer Natalie Batalha, deputy science team lead for NASA's Kepler Space Telescope that discovered the star.