Artist’s concept of the Thirty Meter Telescope atop the volcanic peak of Mauna Kea in Hawaii. The construction phase of the TMT project officially kicked off in October 2014; the telescope should achieve “first light” in 2022, if all goes according to plan.Credit: Courtesy TMT International Observatory The group building a huge telescope on Hawaii’s […]
Early summer is an “in-between” time in the skies. The realm of the galaxies has moved off to the west, but the summer Milky Way has not yet arrived. This is the best time of year to observe globular clusters and double stars. The centerpiece of the early summer constellations is Boötes, the herdsman, with […]
NASA is celebrating the New Year on Mars on June 19, 2015. One Mars year is 687 days long, nearly twice the time of an Earth year, due to Mars’ longer orbit around the sun.Credit: NASA It’s New Year’s Day on the Red Planet today and NASA is celebrating in style with an epic three-day […]
This photo, taken by NASA astronaut Scott Kelly from the International Space Station, shows Tropical Storm Bill in the Gulf of Mexico on June 15, 2015.Credit: Scott Kelly/NASA Tropical Storm Bill lurks menacingly near the coast of Texas in a photo taken from space yesterday (June 15). The image was captured from the International Space […]
Meteorites from Mars found on Earth have traces of methane, adding weight to the idea that life could live off methane on the Red Planet, scientists say. But the methane detection alone is not proof that life exists on Mars now or in the past, they add.Credit: Image by Michael Helfenbein Methane, a potential sign […]
JPL engineers Joel Steinkraus and Farah Alibay display a full-scale mechanical mock-up of a MarCO 6U cubesat.Credit: JPL WASHINGTON — Two tiny cubesats, the first NASA plans to send to another planet, will keep watch on the agency’s InSight mission as it descends to the Martian surface in September 2016, an agency official said June 9. […]
The many “faces” of Pluto are visible in new images by NASA’s New Horizon’s probe, which is only one month away from the first-ever close encounter with the dwarf planet. This week, NASA released what it called “the best views ever obtained of the Pluto system” taken by New Horizons, which will make its closest […]
“Happy Constellations” by artist Fin’es Scott, one of The Museum of Flight’s 25 “Astronauts on the Town” art statues, is on display at Theo Chocolate in Seattle, Washington.Credit: The Museum of Flight Some two dozen astronauts are landing under Seattle’s Space Needle and if you can snap a selfie with one or more of them, […]
Earth observation image of the week: a Sentinel-1A image of the Indonesian island of Borneo, also featured on the Earth from Space video programme To source
Tomorrow’s satellites must evolve – because the space they operate in is changing. New regulations on cutting space debris are influencing satellite design, and ESA is reaching out to satellite builders. To source
A cosmic butterfly of a nebula is undergoing a stunning metamorphosis in space, according to new images from a telescope in Chile. The celestial view, captured by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, is actually the result of dust spit out of a dying star that is then shaped by a stellar companion to […]
This image from a pilot project, the Deep Lens Survey (DLS), offers up an example of what the sky will look like when observed by LSST. The images from LSST will have twice DLS’ depth and resolution, while also covering 50,000 times the area of this particular image, and in six different optical colors.Credit: Deep […]
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) robot has 4 limbs and can become quite handy in disaster situations. The robot’s mission (and how it could accomplish it) is the subject of the the latest “Crazy Engineering” episode from NASA JPL. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech To source