New rocket hopes to take off with launch from the skies
Start with the largest aircraft ever built, with a wingspan longer than a football field and a split fuselage fitted with six Boeing 747 jet engines — enough thrust to get 585,000 kg off the ground, about 190,000 kg more than a fully loaded ...
With planets easy to find, astronomer sets sights on alien spacecraft
In the field of planet hunting, Geoff Marcy is a star. After all, the astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley found nearly three-quarters of the first 100 planets discovered outside our solar system. But with the hobbled planet-hunting Kepler telescope having just about ...
Origin of gold found in neutron star bursts
Gold — atomic number 79, element symbol Au and the most widely beloved of the precious metals — might have its origin in extremely rare and violent explosions in the far reaches of outer space.
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 ...
The Kepler space telescope, the celebrated discoverer of worlds around distant stars, may have found its last planet. NASA scientists announced on Wednesday that the telescope, which to date has cost $600 million to build and operate, has lost the ability to point accurately. It is ...
Houston, we have a superstar: Crooning astronaut Hadfield's enthusiasm goes viral down on Earth
Chris Hadfield, who crawled out of a space capsule on the plains of Kazakhstan early Tuesday, is dealing with gravity for the first time in five months and sudden global celebrity after singing a gone-viral made-in-space music video. By late Wednesday, almost 10 million people ...
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 ...
Satellite data may change understanding of universe's origin
Possibly the most daring piece of modern science is the attempt to predict the patterns that galaxies make in the sky. The bold starting point is a statement on what the universe was like at a time when the entire visible universe was compressed ...
Obama to order NASA to bag asteroid, send astronauts to study it
The next giant leap in space exploration may be a short hop on a small space rock. This week, President Barack Obama will request $105 million in NASA's 2014 budget for a mission that would capture a small asteroid, tug it near the moon and ...
The first results from a $2 billion instrument aboard the International Space Station offer tentative support for the theory that exotic dark matter, invisible but abundant, permeates the universe.
