Update: At 10:03 AM CST, the European Space Agency Rosetta control room erupted in hugs, cheers, and a cry of “We’re down! We’re down!” Original Story The European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission is on track to attempt a historic first soft landing on a comet on Wednesday. After separating from the the Rosetta spacecraft overnight, […]
Artist’s impression of cosmic billiards around NGC 2547-ID. Credit: NASA JPL-CalTech NASA/JPL News Story: August 28, 2014 NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has spotted an eruption of dust around a young star, possibly the result of a smashup between large asteroids. This type of collision can eventually lead to the formation of planets. Scientists had been […]
Artists Conception : Credit Rob Gizis, CUNY BMCC An astronomer at Penn State University appears to discovered the first ever direct evidence of water ice clouds on another world. That world is WISE J0855-0714, an enigmatic brown dwarf of “failed star” located only 7.3 light years from Earth. The discovery was made using images from […]
NASA’s JPL has a news story about the the possible discovery of interstellar dust particles trapped in aerogel designed just for just that purpose and included aboard the appropriately named Stardust space probe. Stardust flew through the tail of the comet Wild 2 in 2004, returning its samples to Earth the next year in the […]
We’ve seen elements of the story before; a team of experts, some long in the tooth, are put together in order to contact a long derelict spacecraft in hopes of averting disaster. Other times the old probe comes back with a new mission, aka V’Ger or its equally confused predecessor NOMAD. One way or another, […]
Image Credit: VLT Survey Telescope, ESO Always nice to end the week with an observation from the wildly prolific European Southern Observatory. Source: ESO Top News “The VLT Survey Telescope (VST) at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile has captured a beautifully detailed image of the galaxy Messier 33. This nearby spiral, the second closest large […]
Image credit: Cheongho Han, Chungbuk National University, Republic of Korea A planetary discovery by four international teams of astronomers and led by Andrew Gould of the Ohio State University is leading to yet another re-examination of the number of stars which could potentially host Earth-like planets, and the number just keeps going up. For […]
The quickly expanding list of privately funded space ventures added a new name this week, The Boldly Go Institute, and its goals are worthy of the name. Headlined by Dr. Jon Morse, Dr. Laurie Leshin and Dr. Scott Parazynski, all NASA veterans, the institute seeks to step in where NASA is falling short with big […]
The story itself is not new, with the popular press reporting on the Alcubierre/warp drive theory NASA’s Dr. Sonny White has been working on for several years now, but the images ….. oh my. Gizmodo has an article out providing some graphic renderings of a warp drive starship which would roughly fit within dimensions suggested […]
Image Credit: NASA/ESA What a big, beautiful and gloriously colorful universe. NASA News Story: Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have assembled a comprehensive picture of the evolving universe – among the most colorful deep space images ever captured by the 24-year-old telescope. Researchers say the image, in new study called the Ultraviolet Coverage of the Hubble […]
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