Supercharged CEO Musk aims for cars and stars
When Hollywood wanted to bring to life Tony Stark, the comic-book engineering prodigy who grew up to be the billionaire industrialist and slick playboy alter ego of Iron Man, it turned to the closest thing the real world seemed to offer. "We need to sit ...
Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata passed the title of commander of the International Space Station to U.S. astronaut Steven Swanson early Monday and prepared to return to Earth. He spent 66 days in the role, marking a first for any astronaut from Asia. "I had an ...
Sleepy New Mexico town gears up for commercial launches as Spaceport America's moment of truth nears
After passing a sign reading, "Danger: falling aliens," New Mexico artist Roy Lohr and his dog, Yoda, lead visitors to the "spaceport" he has built in his backyard out of wine bottles and cement. It is no wonder the lanky 69-year-old embraces the real Spaceport ...
Astronauts plan to grow lettuce for rocket salad
Most people associate NASA with rocket science, but now the U.S. space agency has turned its attention to rocket salad. A portable greenhouse to grow lettuce was taken to the International Space Station (ISS) during last week's supply mission. Provided that the astronauts can cut ...
Scientists have for the first time measured the spin of a planet outside our solar system — a large gas planet located a relatively close 63 light-years from Earth. They determined that the planet, named Beta Pictoris b, spins faster than any in our solar ...
As club sandwiches go, this undoubtedly is the biggest one in the solar system. Scientists on Friday said that Jupiter's moon Ganymede may possess ice and liquid oceans stacked up in several layers much like the popular multilayered sandwich. They added that this arrangement may ...
Telescope to probe deepest space
Cerro Armazones is a crumbling dome of rock that dominates the parched peaks of the Chilean coastal range north of Santiago. Even the views look alien, with the surrounding boulder-strewn desert bearing a remarkable resemblance to the landscape of Mars. Dramatic change is on its way ...
Gravitational waves carry clues on big bang
The sighting came from a small telescope on the roof of a laboratory sitting on the ice sheet three-quarters of a mile (1.3 kilometers) from the geographic South Pole. First came the rumors. But then researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics went public. Their telescope ...
Fierce solar blasts that could have badly damaged electrical grids and disabled satellites in space narrowly missed Earth in 2012, U.S. researchers said. The bursts would have wreaked havoc on the Earth's magnetic field, matching the severity of the 1859 Carrington Event, the largest solar ...
Gravitational waves following universe's expansion after Big Bang seen
Astronomers announce that they have discovered what many consider the holy grail of their field: ripples in the fabric of space-time that are echoes of the massive expansion of the universe that took place just after the Big Bang.
A supermassive black hole inside a distant quasar spins at about 336 million mph (540 million kph), roughly half the speed of light, according to research published in the journal Nature. Scientists have measured the spin rates of black holes before, but never one so ...
About 5 million years ago, an asteroid or comet slammed into Mars so hard that rocks and other debris launched into space. Some eventually landed on Earth, becoming the "shergottites," the biggest of three main types of meteorites from Mars. Now researchers say they have pinpointed ...
