[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, NASA, JPL – Processed Image Copyright: Ted Stryk] Despina is a tiny moon of Neptune … discovered in 1989, in images from the Voyager 2 spacecraft taken during its encounter with the solar system’s most distant gas giant planet. But looking through the Voyager 2 data 20 years later, […]
Signs of life beyond Earth could be found within a decade under the most optimistic scenarios but the U.S. will need to keep up spending to maintain pace in a 21st century space race, astrobiologists told Congress on Wednesday. Sara Seager, a physics and planetary science professor at MIT and recipient of a 2013 MacArthur […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION / NASA/JPL/SSI; Composition: Gordan Ugarkovic] This image of Saturn could not have been taken from Earth. No Earth based picture could possibly view the night side of Saturn and the corresponding shadow cast across Saturn’s rings. Since Earth is much closer to the Sun than Saturn, only the day […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION] It has picked up almost universally positive reviews and is being tipped for Oscars glory next year. Now Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity has begun to pick up praise from a surprising source – Christian critics who say the 3D space spectacular celebrates the presence of God in the universe. Paul […]
Ben Rich was the director of Lockheed’s Skunk Works from 1975 to 1991. Skunk Works is a division of Lockheed Martin that develops super high-tech aircraft, and is responsible for developing the U-2, the SR-71 Blackbird, the F-117 Nighthawk stealth bomber, and the F-22 Raptor. In a recent interview with Open Minds, Jan Harzan, the […]
Here is what might happen if we suddenly encountered a day without satellites… 08:00 There was nothing sudden. Planes did not fall out of the sky, the lights didn’t go out or the water supplies fail. At least, not at first. … But outside, the loss of global satellite communications was putting the world in […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLTUION] / Cassini Imaging Team, SSI, JPL, ESA, NASA It was one of the largest and longest lived storms ever recorded in our Solar System. First seen in late 2010, the above cloud formation in the northern hemisphere of Saturn started larger than the Earth and soon spread completely around […]
[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 […]
