Jul 16
The Milky Way’s current record holder, Eta Carinae, has some competition in the Peony nebula star
Jul 16
Voyager 2 has been in space for 30 years. It has sent back data that show exotic particles from outside the solar system dominate the outer edge of our solar system. That means it’s much more complex out there than we thought.
Jul 16
The ISS, you see, is already an interplanetary spacecraft — at least potentially. It’s missing a drive system and a steerage module, but those are technicalities. It could fairly easily be retrofitted for operations beyond low-Earth orbit. In principle, we could fly it almost anywhere within the inner solar system.
Jul 16
A good-sized asteroid sailing past our planet right now turns out to be two giant rocks doing a celestial jig.Now seen as two objects orbiting each other, the pair will be closest to Earth on July 14, at about 1.4 million miles (2 million kilometers) away. That’s nearly six times as far from us as the moon.
Jul 16
By day, the engineers work on NASA’s new Ares moon rockets. By night, some go undercover to work on a competing design. These dissenting scientists and their backers insist they have created an alternative rocket that would be safer, cheaper and easier to build than the two Ares spacecraft that will replace the space shuttle.
Jul 16
This beautiful cosmic cloud is a popular stop on telescopic tours of the constellation Sagittarius. Eighteenth century cosmic toyurist Charles Messier cataloged the bright nebula as M8, while modern day astronomers recognize the Lagoon Nebula as an active stellar nursery about 5,000 light-years distant, in direction of the center of our Milky Way