Those who have long feared an invasion from Mars or further afield can relax — at least, that is, if they believe the Ministry of Defence. An end has been ordered to all official investigations of Unidentified Flying Objects, or UFOs, after the ministry ruled they do not pose a threat to the nation’s security. […]
[FOR HIGH RESOLUTION IMAGE, CLICK ON IMAGE] The above image … is a high resolution version of a distant wall of Gale Crater captured by the Curiosity rover that landed on Mars last week. A corresponding true color image exists showing how this scene actually appears on Mars. The robotic Curiosity rover continues to check […]
Results from an expedition to far eastern Russia that set out to find the origin of naturally occurring quasicrystals have provided convincing evidence that they arrived on Earth from outer space. Writing in IOP Publishing’s journal Reports on Progress in Physics, Paul J Steinhardt and Luca Bindi reveal that new, naturally occurring quasicrystal samples have […]
[FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, CLICK ON IMAGE BELOW] You’ve just landed on Mars and opened your eyes — what do you see? If you’re the Curiosity rover, you see a strange gravelly place with a large mountain in the distance. You’ve landed on target near the edge of 150-km wide Gale Crater, with Mount Sharp on […]
[FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, CLICK ON IMAGE.] Denizens of planet Earth watched last year’s Perseid meteor shower by looking up into the bright moonlit night sky. But this remarkable view captured on August 13, 2011 by astronaut Ron Garan looks down on a Perseid meteor. From Garan’s perspective onboard the International Space Station orbiting at an […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION] Just as it captured the Phoenix lander parachuting to Mars in 2008, the HiRise camera onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) snapped this picture of the Curiosity rover’s spectacular descent toward its landing site on August 5 (PDT). The nearly 16 meter (51 foot) wide parachute and its payload […]
The truth is that only the United States has had the knowledge and moxie to successfully land a vehicle on Mars. We have now done it seven times, and no other nation has really come particularly close. And with the touchdown of the one-ton and highly sophisticated Curiosity, the U.S. has reached a whole new […]
Though it appeared to Messier to be fuzzy and round and without stars, Messier 5 (M5) is now known to be a globular star cluster, 100,000 stars or more, bound by gravity and packed into a region around 165 light-years in diameter. It lies some 25,000 light-years away. Roaming the halo of our galaxy, globular […]
PASADENA, Calif. — About 34 hours from the Mars rover Curiosity’s landing (scheduled for 01:31 am Eastern time on Monday), NASA brought us the latest weather forecast from the surface — dry and cold, with a slight chance of dust. Slight is good. Earlier this week, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spotted a dust storm south […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION] You don’t have to be at Monument Valley to see the Milky Way arch across the sky like this — but it helps. Only at Monument Valley USA would you see a picturesque foreground that includes these iconic rock peaks called buttes. Buttes are composed of hard rock left […]
