NASA yesterday hosted a teleconference to discuss the first published results to come from the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, an audacious and expensive research instrument located on the outside of the International Space Station. The goal of AMS, which was brought up on Endeavor’s final flight, is to use powerful magnetic fields to funnel incoming solar particles for analysis […]
We are currently living in what many consider a golden age of astronomical discovery in which ongoing analysis of data produced by various space telescopes such as Kepler and Wise is constantly rewriting our understanding of the cosmos both distant and close. In the latter category comes yesterday’s announcement from JPL that astronomers have discovered Earth’s third nearest star […]
Less than a day before liftoff of the next SpaceX Dragon headed for the International Space Station, NASA held a science briefing at Kennedy Space Center to highlight the work related to this mission. Officially there will be 330 kg going up and 500 coming down, which doesn’t necessarily sound like much, but with the increasing […]
Source : Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics NASA”s Kepler space telescope, which is searching for planets transiting across their home stars in one very small segment of the sky has already produced volumes of data and leading to the confirmation of 105 extra solar planets. Now, astronomers using Kepler’s discoveries as a baseline, along with a new […]
Only hours after NASA announced the latest winners in its Flight Opportunities Program housed in the Office of the Chief Technologist, researchers announced a major scientific discovery made possible by a similarly brief suborbital launch conducted on a Black Brant sounding rocket on July 11 as part of NASA’s separate Low Cost Access to Space program. The High Resolution Coronal […]
Another amazing image from the European Southern Observatory, this one taken from the 2.2 meter telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile. The image shows a stellar nursery in the cloud Lupus 3, 5 light years across and located 600 light years from Earth in the constellation Scorpius. The coffee colored cloud is host to a […]
Source: JPL One of the most promising potential locations for eventual human settlement in the outer solar system is Saturn’s fascinating moon, Titan. Bigger than innermost planet Mercury, half again as large as our own Moon, and second only to Ganymede in total size, Titan possesses a thick nitrogen atmosphere, which blankets a bizarre frigid landscape dominated by the hydrocarbons methane and ethane. […]
Source: JPL News Release Astronomers are rapidly closing in on the rather intriguing conclusion that there is on average at least one planet for every star in the Milky Way Galaxy and probably a lot more than that. The numbers are straighforward, but staggering. Approximately 100 billion stars give or take, yields a planetary count in the hundreds […]
Innerspace.net is primarily focused on developments in the international launch industry and the quest for progressively more affordable space transportation. It also attempts to keep in focus some of the reasons achieving that goal benefits science and society as a whole; to better understand the astonishing wonders in our own solar system, and those far beyond, even if we have […]
NASA Glenn recently announced that it has passed the 43,000 hour mark of continuous operation of its NEXT (NASA Evolutionary Xenon Thruster) ion thruster. Although coverage focused on the long running duration, the more relevent statistic is that NEXT represents a significant advancement over the first generation NSTAR ion thruster which powered Deep Space 1, and is currently accelerating the DAWN mission towards an […]
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