A NASA robot ship will pluck a large boulder off an asteroid and sling it around the moon, becoming an ad hoc destination to prepare for future human missions to Mars, the U.S. space agency said on Wednesday. The so-called Asteroid Redirect Mission is estimated ...
Japan scientists among winners of funds for unmanned lunar voyage
A team of Japanese scientists was among the five winners of a cash prize from a U.S. foundation to fund ongoing development of technologies for an unmanned trip to the moon. Team Hakuto, led by Tohoku University professor Kazuya Yoshida, was awarded $500,000 for its ...
Did Mars have life? NASA rover finds methane, organic chemicals
Methane in the Martian atmosphere and organic chemicals in the red planet's soil are the latest tantalizing findings of NASA's Mars Curiosity rover as it hunts for clues about the possibility of extraterrestrial life, scientists said on Tuesday. NASA scientists said Curiosity found periodic bursts ...
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency aims to give a name to the destination asteroid for the Hayabusa2 mission, which blasted off Wednesday, a senior agency official said. It might consider asking the public for a name, said Hitoshi Kuninaka, a professor and project manager at ...
As the first probe ever to be stationed on a comet hibernates, attention is turning to the Rosetta orbiter, which is still buzzing around the space snowball. The Philae lander's batteries lasted about 60 hours before running out. Rosetta is expected to observe comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko ...
AP — British physicist Matt Taylor brimmed with excitement Wednesday as the European Space Agency's Philae lander separated from the Rosetta spacecraft, showing off a colorful tattoo on his thigh of the two craft while proclaiming, "We're making history." But the unconventional Rosetta project scientist's ...
Some of the most detailed images ever taken of new planets being born around a star were published Thursday, which astronomers said could transform theories about planet formation. High in the Chilean desert, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) observed the planet-forming disc around the ...
Water found in Earth's oceans, in meteorites and frozen in lunar craters predates the birth of the solar system, a study published on Thursday shows, a finding with implications for the search for life on other planets. Scientists have long debated whether the solar system's ...
NASA's new heavy-lift rocket, designed to fly astronauts to the moon, asteroids and eventually Mars, likely will not have its debut test flight until November 2018, nearly a year later than previous estimates, agency officials said on Wednesday. NASA is 70 percent confident of making ...
Your ad in this space: Private companies fund cleanup of orbiting junk
Nobu Okada wants to save the planet from orbiting junk, which he says threatens to cut us off from the satellites we depend on and prevent us from traveling into space. But to help fund that, he needs to land a can of powdered ...
Deep underground, water, water everywhere but not a drop to drink
If you want to find Earth's vast reservoirs of water, you may have to look beyond the obvious places like the oceans and polar ice caps. Scientists on Friday said massive amounts of water appear to exist deep beneath the planet's surface, trapped in a ...
A group of citizen scientists can take over a 36-year-old decommissioned robotic space probe that will fly by the Earth in August, NASA says. Launched in 1978, the International Sun/Earth Explorer-3 (ISEE-3) spacecraft studied how the stream of charged particles flowing from the sun, the ...
