By George Marston, Newsarama Contributor | December 8, 2017 07:33am ET Credit: Paramount Pictures Director Quentin Tarantino met with screenwriters this week for his reported “Star Trek” film, according to Deadline. The trade reports that “The Revenant” screenwriter Mark L. Smith is the frontrunner, alongside writers Lindsey Beer and Drew Pearce. What’s more, Deadline says that the […]
NASA’s Mars rover Opportunity captured this view of late-afternoon shadows, including one cast by the rover itself, stretching toward the floor of Endeavour Crater. Opportunity’s navigation camera recorded the three component images on Nov. 11, 2017, about a week before Opportunity’s eighth Martian winter solstice. The harsh Martian elements still haven’t broken NASA’s long-lived Opportunity […]
The term “astronomy” as it is represented in sign language in different countries. It may now be a bit easier for hearing-impaired people to discuss and study the cosmos. A team of scientists and educators has just released a list of 47 common astronomy terms — such as comet , galaxy, asteroid and telescope — […]
This map, created by the European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft during its first year of operations, shows stars in our Milky Way galaxy, as well as neighboring galaxies. The European Space Agency (ESA) has extended the operational life of eight missions, including its billion-star-mapping Gaia project and its Mars Express orbiter. The Gaia spacecraft launched […]
Pages from Jonathan Fisher’s 200-year-old journal reveal sunspots during the 1816 “year without a summer.” Most of the journal is written in code, but the scientific observations are not. A 200-year-old journal found in a small house in Maine gives a rare look at the sun’s face ages ago. The aged pages are among a […]
ESA astronaut Paolo Nespoli captured imagery of Somalia and the surrounding region from the International Space Station. European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Paolo Nespoli has spent a lot of time orbiting planet Earth on two tours of duty aboard the International Space Station, and one on a NASA space shuttle mission. He’s spending his last month […]
This composite image shows the distribution of dark matter, galaxies, and hot gas in the core of the merging galaxy cluster Abell 520. “False-colored” maps show the concentration of starlight, hot gas, and dark matter in the cluster. The blue-colored areas pinpoint the location of most of the mass in the cluster, which is dominated […]
Artist’s rendering of PTScientists’ Audi lunar quattro rover driving to the Apollo 17 lunar roving vehicle on the moon. A German company aiming to send robotic rovers on the first mission to return to the last Apollo moon landing site has pledged to respect and protect the historic artifacts present there. PTScientists announced it has […]
An Iridium flare shines above the white dome of the Isaac Newton Telescope in this photo by astrophotographer Miguel Claro. Miguel Claro is a Lisbon, Portugal-based professional photographer, author and science communicator who creates spectacular images of the night sky. As a European Southern Observatory photo ambassador , a member of The World At Night […]
Of the four rocky, terrestrial planets, only Mars has more than one moon. The two small bodies that orbit the red planet are both smaller than Earth’s moon, and raise a number of questions about the formation of the early solar system. Identity crisis Phobos and Deimos bear more resemblance to asteroids than to Earth’s […]
NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took this image of the larger of Mars’ two moons, Phobos, from a distance of about 6,800 kilometers (about 4,200 miles). The Martian moon Phobos orbits only a few thousand miles above the Red Planet’s surface. Its proximity to its planet is one of the reasons astronomers were unable to see […]
A Rocket Lab Electron rocket sits on the launchpad at the company’s launch facility in New Zealand, ahead of a test flight. The launch window opens Dec. 8, 2017. [embedded content] Update 12/14: Rocket Lab delayed the launch of its Electron rocket again, this time because a power fault was detected during ground checkouts. Company […]
Harrison “Jack” Schmitt was the lunar module pilot on the sixth and final human landing on the moon, NASA’s Apollo 17 mission, which launched 45 years ago today (Dec. 7). He is eager to see a rebirth of the zeal for U.S. human space exploration that boosted Schmitt and Apollo 17 Cmdr. Eugene Cernan onto […]