[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION] Credit: ISS Expedition 30, NASA On another April 12th, in 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Alexseyevich Gagarin became the first human to see planet Earth from space. Commenting on his view from orbit he reported, “The sky is very dark; the Earth is bluish.” On yet another April 12th, in […]
In September 2012, Michael Rhodes, a technician at the National Declassification Center (NDC) in College Park, Md., donned white cotton gloves, entered a climate-controlled room, and opened a cardboard file box. It was time for the report inside—”Project 1794 Final Development Summary Report 2 April—30 May 1956″—to become public. He soon realized that the file […]
Beyond a fertile field of satellite communication antennas at Kennedy Space Center, an Atlas V rocket streaks into orbit in this long exposure photograph. In the thoughtfully composed image recorded on the evening of Jan. 30, the antennas in the foreground bring to mind the rocket’s payload, a Tracking and Data Relay Satellite. This TDRS-K […]
Deep Space Industries, Inc, announced plans to send a fleet of asteroid-prospecting to target asteroids in 2015 The first step in mining asteroids is to learn more about them. DSI aims to launch a fleet of FireFlies in 2015 to prospect promising near-Earth asteroids, determining properties such as their composition and spin rate. When Planetary […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION / NASA, JPL-Caltech, MSSS, MAHLI] What’s in this smooth soil on Mars? In late October, NASA’s robotic Curiosity rover stopped near a place dubbed Rocknest as it continues to explore Gale Crater on Mars. Rocknest is the group of stones seen near the top left of the above image […]
NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft has entered a new region at the far reaches of our solar system that scientists feel is the final area the spacecraft has to cross before reaching interstellar space. Scientists refer to this new region as a magnetic highway for charged particles because our sun’s magnetic field lines are connected to […]
A self-proclaimed systems engineer, BTE Dan is the person behind Build the Enterprise, a website devoted to, well, building an actual, functional, space lasers ‘n all version of the USS Enterprise, the venerable pop-culture starship featured in the “Star Trek” film and television franchises. Estimated time frame? Twenty years. Suggested cost? $1 trillion. Proposed missions? […]
[CLICK TO SEE INFOGRAPHIC] Austrian daredevil Felix Baumgartner set a new world record Sunday when he leapt from a capsule suspended 128,100 feet–about 24 miles–above Earth’s surface. Watching the livefeed as he opened the capsule door and prepared to jump, we thought he looked very much like a man perched on the edge of space. […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION] Curiosity is on the move across Mars — but where is it going? The car-sized rover’s path after 29 Martian days on the surface is shown on the above map. Curiosity is still almost 300 meters from its first major destination, though, a meeting of different types of terrain […]
The vast majority of stars in the Milky Way don’t go it alone — most have a companion, or even two or three. It stands to reason that life outside the solar system might have a sky less like our own and more like Tatooine, the Star Wars planet with a double sunset. Many binary […]
