South Africa is entering the space realm. The Denel Group is creating a high resolution, Earth observing satellite. The satellite will be called the EO-Sat1, and will be monitored by the South African National Space Agency.
On 6 September, NASA’s rocket Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) took off from Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. At the same time, a frog took one giant leap for amphibiankind and photobombed the whole thing. Take that, rocket ship.
NASA has a VEGGIE program, thats short for the Vegetable Production System programme, somehow. After successful attempts to grow zucchinis and other plants in zero gravity under artificial lights, NASA has announced plans to sustain space travellers on the International Space Station with produce grown on the station itself.
Arriving a little late for the space-race aren’t we China? While NASA is looking at photos of Mars taken by their Curiosity rover, the China National Space Administration has been sending lunar probes into orbit around the moon… And they’ve announced they’re ready to land an unmanned probe on the surface
Sunday marked the one year anniversary of Neil Armstrong’s death, and NASA released this music video as a tribute to the late astronaut. On July 20, 1969, Armstrong became the first person to walk on the moon as commander of NASA’s Apollo 11 lunar landing mission.
Elysium Space is offering the best deal around town to get you or your loved one to space by next year. For a cool R19,594 you could be on your way to space. So what’s the catch? To board the CubeStat heading to the outer limits, you have to be dead.
It has almost been a year since NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover touched down on the red planet. The WALL-E lookalike landed on Mars on 6 August last year, and since then has been drilling into the martian planet, collecting soil samples and taking some of the best selfies in the universe.
If at any stage in your life you decided to star gaze, chances are that this spacecraft photographed you. The Cassini spacecraft was in orbit for the first time in nine years and photographed the Earth from 1,4 billion kilometres away.
Becoming an astronaut may have been your childhood dream but can you imagine how difficult it would be to enjoy a fresh cup of coffee in zero gravity?
On Tuesday morning, one unlucky person living on the International Space Station was a victim of every astronauts greatest fear. While Luca Parmitano and Chris Cassidy were on a spacewalk conducting a routine repair of the outskirts of the Station, Parmitano began to panic. It was reported that the Italian astronaut’s helmet began to fill […]
Expedition 36 crew member Karen Nyberg demonstrates how she washes her hair in space. The hair washing process took all of three minutes in the microgravity of the International Space Station (ISS).
The European Space Agency has given us a look into what it would look like if we had to orbit Mars. Using 600 photographs gleaned by the Visual Monitoring Camera this video has been created to give us a first look at the surroundings of the planet. The VMC captured the images during one complete seven-hour […]
This is a first: Chinese astronauts delivering a live lecture from the Tiangong 1 space module. The lesson included demonstrations of weightlessness and “the properties of surface tension while in microgravity.” Students were also able to interact with the astronauts and ask questions.
This is NASA’s largest and most powerful rocket to date. And the aim is for it to have its first test flight in 2017. Low-Earth orbit travel will be a thing of the past for NASA: they want the Space Launch System to take them to new heights.
It’s a big world out there and there are discoveries being made every day. The Learning Mind website put together the top 10 most mind-blowing recent space discoveries.
A new exhibition, which opens on Friday June 7, will give its viewers an experience through space and time. Click through to see some of the images.
NASA’s Curiosity Rover has been poodling around on the surface of Mars for over nine months now, poking in the dirt and sending back pictures of its shadow and/or penises that it drew in the sand. You can thank a humanoid, then, for recovering some of Curiosity’s dignity with this excellent time lapse
Asteroid 1998 EQ2 is 2,7 kilometers long and will make its closest pass to Earth soon. The asteroid is set to fly past Earth on 31 May 2013, in what will be the closest encounter for the asteroid to date.
A meteorite collided with the surface of the Moon creating an explosion 10 times greater than anything ever seen before – it was the Moon’s biggest explosion to date. It was even visible from Earth with the naked eye.
Canadian astronaut and former Commander of the ISS, Chris Hadfield treats us to an “out of this world” cover of David Bowie’s Space Oditty as his final goodbye.
First flight of the SpaceShipTwo goes supersonic. Virgin Galactic’s rocket has taken flight over California with Richard Branson watching every move. Watch SpaceShipTwo’s first flight.
Since man first penetrated Earth’s atmosphere, a slew of garbage has been piling up in Near Space. The majority of the junk up there is from space shuttles. Heiner Klinkrad, a European Space Agency (ESA) space expert estimates there to be about 27,000 objects in orbit, travelling 80 times faster than a passenger jet, and that number grows, daily.
Anybody up for winning a trip to Mars? Dutch company, Mars One began looking for volunteer astronauts to fly to Mars on Monday. The departure date is set for the year 2022, with landing set to be in 2023. And they’re going to finance it with reality TV
In a an event usually reserved for Russian YouTube, night turned to day in Santiago del Estero, Argentina on Saturday evening. The video shows footage taken at a concert when the sky suddenly illuminates, so much so that it looks like day for a split second.
We all love that feeling of getting into fluffy jammies and cuddling up, horizontally, into our feather down beds. But do astronauts have the same luxury? Think again!
It’s earth month everyone, and as a tribute to our pale blue dot, NASA has put together a highlights reel of shots of the earth from space captured over the course of 2012, so we can “understand and sustain our home planet”.
Canadian Astronaut, Commander Chris Hadfield has risen to Twitter fame over the course of the last few months by tweeting beautiful pictures of earth from the point of view of the International Space Station, currently orbiting around the planet at a sedate pace of 27 600km per hour. Consider this one, for example. The Isle […]
A staggering R1,9 billion has been allocated over three years for the The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) and MeerKAT radio telescope projects. That is a lot of money on a project that South Africans don’t understand. According to the Square Kilometre Array website, the SKA is not the average telescope system. Rather than filtering light waves […]
Unites States millionaire, Dennis Tito is looking for a couple to send on a round trip to Mars in 2018. Tito reportedly paid £13 million in 2001 for a ticket to become the first private space tourist. The round trip to Mars will reportedly take 501 days, and project leaders are looking for a couple who have been […]
Asteroid 2012 D14 is set to bypass earth this afternoon. Scientists estimate the asteroid to be half the size of a football field and could experience “violent tremours” due to earth’s gravitational pull. There is even the possibility of the asteroid interrupting telecommunications when it passes. The asteroid will pass 27 680 km away from […]