This massive solar whip or filament is 800 000 kilometers long. That’s 20 times the circumference of the earth. Makes you feel small, doesn’t it. The gigantic solar filament collapse has been caught on a NASA observatory camera.
Unless you’re currently in some kind of deep space training program, or you have some diabolical plan that no one knows about, the chances are pretty slim that you’ll ever actually get to set foot on Mars. Thankfully, we’ve got the next best thing for you, a fully interactive 360° panorama from the surface of the Red Planet. Enjoy.
Curiosity has landed. Nasa Administrator Charles Bolden: “Today, the wheels of Curiosity have begun to blaze the trail for human footprints on Mars.”
The Mini-Cooper sized Curiosity Rover is on target to land on the surface of Mars at 07h31 am on August 6th. This presents the most advanced mission to Mars in the history of space exploration. William Shatner and Will Wheaton have contributed their voices to videos explaining the mission.
After months and months of image collection, NASA has released what is the best image of Mars yet. If you can’t get there this week, this is the next best thing. Described by Nasa as the ‘Greeley Panorama’ from the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity, the first image documents the fifth Martian Winter of the mission.
In my opinion this is a far more exciting countdown than the Olympics; in 40 days, NASA’s nuclear powered Curiosity rover will enter the Martian atmosphere, and the landing is the most nerve-racking part for the engineers.
Deep space travel is creeping ever closer to becoming a reality and one of the biggest challenges faced, apart from actually getting astronauts to their destination, is providing a constant supply of fresh food, water and air. An ambitious project by students at the University of Colorado and Colorado State University looks take of all of these with one foul swoop.
NASA will start training a team astronauts to land on an asteroid in the next month, in preparation for a mission that will take humans farther from Earth than ever before. They’ll be collecting mineral samples and determining how to destroy an asteroid in the event that it might collide with the Earth. Seriously.
Time-tested wisdom says the sky’s the limit. However, a group of billionaires are looking to change that as they launch the first ever venture to mine asteroids, in space. For real. Click through for the details.
Earlier this week, space shuttle Discovery took its final flight, from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center to Dulles International Airport, on the back of a 747. That’s a space shuttle piggybacking on a jumbo jet, and it was awesome. Click through for the video.
Yesterday NASA managed to capture the clearest-yet footage of a solar flare in process after magnetic fields on the Sun’s northeastern curve exploded in huge streams of plasma and sun stuff. The footage only accounts for about five seconds of explosion, but it’s very, very cool, both in and out of time-lapse.
Have you ever wondered what the universe would look like on a single photo? You did!? Well, what a coincidence, because NASA has just released this infrared map of the entire universe. This serves as a capstone for a bigger cosmic map – containing 18 000 images and 560 million different objects. It took NASA fourteen years of preparation and three years of data collection.
NASA officials have announced that the first launch of a commercially built space capsule to the International Space Station is scheduled for the end of April. California-based Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) are the dudes responsible for the capsule in question, the unmanned Dragon spacecraft.
Bad. Ass. NASA has released a new space atlas, detailing over 560 million stars, galaxies and asteroids, many never seen before. The 18 000 awesome images were taken by NASA’s infrared space telescope, the Wide-field Survey Explorer (WISE). Take a look at some of the incredible space-images after the space-jump.
Hey Doomsdayers, guess what? The world isn’t going to end in 2012, or any time soon for that matter. At least that’s according to a NASA astrophysicist, who I’d assume has a library that smells of rich mahogany and is filled with many leather-bound books, and also a degree in astrophysics.
It’s normally the scientists and engineers that go up into space, but NASA has realised that while people are up there, they need to eat. Whilst a little ahead of itself, a study has opened in Hawaii to find a chef for Mars. Do you have what it takes?
Nobody has any idea where they’re planning on getting funding from – but like a kid with an extended birthday wish list, NASA has unveiled some amazing concepts of future, eco-friendly aircraft, which they’re calling “greener flying machines for the year 2025.” Assuming they’re still here then.
People who like Pink Floyd references, rejoice, because NASA’s Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission has beamed back its first video of the dark side of the moon. Click through to see what that astronaut that everybody forgets about saw while Armstrong and Aldrin were hogging all the glory.
Looks like the iPhone is going to have to update its default lock-screen. A new 64-megapixel, high-definition version of the “Blue Marble” has been taken from the newest Earth observation satellite, Suomi NPP, 824 kilometres above the earth. It’s a stunning photo of the planet, built out of several composite “swaths.”
NASA has launched an open-source portal to make it easier for agencies to evaluate and improve upon its projects. The initial setup works as a simple directory of open-sourced projects in development, which is hoped to expand into a platform for tracking, hosting and planning the various pieces of software created by the American space agency.
NASA wants to put somebody on an asteroid by 2025 because they don’t know how else to get people’s attention. And to succeed in this entirely worthwhile endeavour, they’ve designed a mechanism by which to harpoon asteroids, so that vehicles can land on the thing despite the weakened gravity. Call me Ishmael.
We all have our lapses of judgment. But some of us make such horrendously poor decisions that one simply has to ask, “What were they on?”. Every week we bring you three contenders in what can only be described as a battle of small wits. So, with great pleasure we present this week’s three La […]
Remember that defunct NASA satellite that was going to fall to earth some time, they just couldn’t tell us when or where? Well, don’t worry – they’ve told us that it’s definitely going to come screaming down to the planet’s surface some time this week. This Friday, actually.
Because what every good recession needs is a plan to go to space. NASA today announced their new launch vehicle, the Space Launch System (SLS), which should be able to take astronauts past the moon to near-Earth asteroids, and eventually to Mars some time in the 2030s.
Screw climate change, we’ve found a new home. Well, I mean that’s my attitude whenever astronomers says they’ve found new planets within the “Goldiclocks zone” of core temperature – like the one European astronomers announced yesterday, the catchy-sounding HD85512b, which fits life support parameters, and is a little over three times the size of Earth.
Awesome. The Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS), NASA’s defunct, 60 000 kg baby, will be re-entering Earth’s atmosphere sometime later this month or in early October, and NASA doesn’t really know when or where it’s going to happen. What they do know is that it’s going to leave a 800km-wide debris footprint, somewhere. Heads up.
Ending a seven-year mission, NASA has decided to cut off communications with the Mars rover Spirit. Data was last received from Spirit in March 2010, and it hasn’t been heard from since – the thinking is that the rover was damaged during the martian winter when there wasn’t enough solar power for its survival heaters to run.
Ha! Yes. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), is looking at plans to send a humanoid robot to the International Space Station. Except by humanoid I mean it will look attempt to look sexy but end up being insanely creepy. Also, it’s going to post photos and text to Twitter.
So according to the ever pessimistic Russians, we’re all gonna die in the year 2036. See, this 900-foot-long asteroid, epically named ‘99942 Apophis’, is apparently headed towards our measly little planet. NASA doesn’t agree, but don’t you worry, even if things go pear, they’ve got a plan.
The Pale Blue Dot Carl Sagan is a deceased astronaut astronomer. And that miniscule blue dot inside the blue circle is Earth. He is one of the few people to have ever existed who could claim to have pondered global events with a truly broad perspective. When you’ve considered the earth from 6,1 billion miles […]