A global view of Mars created using images taken by NASA’s Viking mission.Credit: NASA/JPL New strategies are required to make sure hitchhiking Earth microbes don’t contanimate Mars and other alien worlds, researchers say. Today’s spacecraft feature sensitive gear that may not be able to withstand the treatment that sterilized previous Mars explorers such as NASA’s […]
The planets of the solar system as depicted by a NASA computer illustration. Orbits and sizes are not shown to scale.Credit: NASA A gas giant is a large planet composed mostly of gases, such as hydrogen and helium, with a relatively small rocky core. The gas giants of our solar system are Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus […]
Astronauts Gordon Cooper (left) and Charles Conrad are seen in the Gemini 5 spacecraft just before launching on their “8 Days or Bust” mission in 1965. The crew was the first to design and wear a mission patch, as shown.Credit: NASA/Museum of Flight/collectSPACE.com Fifty years ago on Monday (Aug. 24), two NASA astronauts were more […]
NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory captured this image of an M5.6 solar flare (visible in the lower-center region of the sun) on Aug. 24, 2015.Credit: NASA/SDO The sun fired off a midlevel solar flare early this morning (Aug. 24) while a NASA satellite watched. The space agency’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) captured an image of the […]
The Japanese cargo ship HTV-5 arrived at the International Space Station on Aug. 24, 2015. Astronaut Kimiya Yui of Japan posted this photo of the spacecraft after capturing it by robotic arm.Credit: Kimiya Yui / Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency via Twitter A robotic Japanese cargo ship made a special delivery to the International Space Station […]
A middle-aged clutch of stars shines in many colors in a new view of deep space by a telescope in Chile. The stars in the image are from an open star cluster…Read More » called IC 4651, which lies in the Milky Way about 3,000 light-years from Earth. Astronomers used the La Silla Observatory in […]
A lightning storm illuminated the Arizona sky in this stunning skywatcher image of the Milky Way. Photographer Stephen Ippolito took this image from Bell Rock in Sedona, Arizona on Aug. 9. “I received a lot of help from mother nature for this image,” he told Space.com in an email. “As you can see, Bell Rock is […]
Aboard the International Space Station, astronaut Scott Kelly talks to journalist Katie Couric on Aug. 19, 2015.Credit: Yahoo News Video What’s it like to live in space? It’s a question that never seems to get old, as demonstrated in a series of interviews this week with astronaut Scott Kelly, who is spending a year aboard […]
For the first time, the International Space Station (ISS) will house a Chinese experiment. The research is to be on board the ISS next year.Credit: NASA A Chinese experiment is being readied for launch toward the International Space Station (ISS) in what could be the forerunner of a larger space-cooperation agenda between the United States […]
A new device can cloak a magnetic field so that it invisible from the outside. Here, a picture of how the wormhole would work.Credit: Jordi Prat-Camps and Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona Ripped from the pages of a sci-fi novel, physicists have crafted a wormhole that tunnels a magnetic field through space. “This device can transmit […]
There’s no reason to fear a devastating asteroid strike next month, NASA experts say. For the last few months, rumors have circulated on the Internet that a big asteroid will slam into Earth near Puerto Rico between Sept. 15 and Sept. 28, wreaking widespread destruction throughout coastal regions of the United States, Mexico, the Caribbean, […]
An epic new trailer for the movie “The Martian” looks even more intense than the last one, and it raises some intriguing questions about the value of human life in space exploration. Set to the howling Jimi Hendrix song “All Along the Watchtower,” the new trailer for “The Martian,” directed by Ridley Scott, features some thrilling […]
Astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti, the record-holder for the longest continuous spaceflight by a woman, joined on as a cast member in the fan project “Star Trek: Axanar.” In April, she tweeted this photo posing in the International Space Station in a “Star Trek: Voyager”-style uniform.Credit: ESA/NASA After spending 199 days on the International Space Station, a […]