As comet ISON hurtles toward the sun, its million-year-long journey through our solar system may end with its violent death — or a spectacular sky show. When the comet rounds the sun on Thursday, Thanksgiving Day in America, professional and amateur astronomers alike will await ...
Billionaire Dennis Tito, tired of being told that we can't send humans to Mars yet, on Wednesday revealed his plan for launching two astronauts to the red planet as early as December 2017. Dubbed "Inspiration Mars," the flyby mission would exploit a rare alignment of ...
Search for Mars life to continue despite rover's findings
Martian life is awfully cryptic — that is a scientific term; it means life that is out of sight, below the surface, burrowed into ecological niches not easily scrutinized by robotic sentinels from the planet Earth.
Paris AFP-JIJI A large asteroid has been named after Alejandro Jodorowsky, the cult Franco-Chilean filmmaker and science-fiction comic book writer who later became a spiritual guru. The Minor Planets Center, a branch of the International Astronomical Union (IAU), has listed asteroid 261690 Jodorowsky at the request ...
Three times in the past decade, the Earth's spin has missed a beat as seemingly random blips cause days to temporarily stretch and shrink. These stutters have emerged from the clearest-ever view of how long a day is. The Earth's rotations fluctuate as the oceans ...
Voyager 1 finds solar system's final frontier is fuzzier than once thought
The edge of the solar system has no edge, it turns out. It has a fuzzy transitional area that is not quite part of our solar system and not quite interstellar space. This basic fact of our star's environment has been discovered by Voyager 1, ...
The White House and NASA are asking the public for help finding asteroids that potentially could slam into the Earth with catastrophic consequences. Citing planetary defense, the administration has decided that the search for killer rocks in space should be the latest in a series ...
Of all the hazards facing a human mission to Mars — something NASA and countless other space buffs would love to see at some point — one of the hardest to solve is the radiation that saturates interplanetary space. New data, gathered by NASA's Curiosity ...
Manned Mars trip no longer a dream
The notion of landing astronauts on Mars has long been more fantasy than reality. The planet is, on average, 225 million km from Earth, and its atmosphere is not hospitable to human life. But a human voyage to the planet is now, for the first ...
NASA probes that are exploring the twin Van Allen radiation belts encircling the Earth have spied a third band of radiation that burst into view and then disappeared, scientists reported Thursday. The discovery of the temporary band of high-energy electrons has stunned scientists and is ...
A close encounter of the rocky kind is set for Feb. 16, when an asteroid the size of an office building will speed past the Earth faster than a bullet.
