Some leading astronomers are quite confident that mankind will make contact with intelligent alien life within two decades. The search for extraterrestrial life will leap forward next year when NASA launches the Kepler space telescope.
WhiteKnightTwo, which will shuttle SpaceShipTwo into suborbital space, is about to be unveiled in the Mojave desert. I believe that’s SpaceShipTwo under the veil
Sometimes, after your eyes adapt to the dark, a spectacular sky appears. Such was the case earlier this month over Ontario, Canada, when part of a spectacular sky also became visible in a reflection off a lake. To start, the brightest objects visible are bright stars and the planet Jupiter, seen as the brightest spot on the upper left.
Rising fuel costs have spurred some pretty wacky ideas. One that maybe isn’t so crazy is harvesting solar power from space. While the idea isn’t new—NASA and The US Department of Energy studied it throughout the 1970s—the time has come when it might not be too expensive to start pursuing it.
A total solar eclipse will darken some of Earth’s skies on Friday, but geography, weather, the economy and even the Olympics are combining to make it a hard and expensive for people to see it.The total blotting out of the sun, which occurs when the moon’s dark inner shadow falls on parts of the Earth, can only be seen in mostly remote places:
Nuclear weapons could be used to stop earth-bound asteroids, but in most instances, they are not the best option, said Apollo astronaut Rusty Schweickart during a public lecture this Wednesday in San Francisco. The scientist explained that all but the largest heavenly bodies can be redirected by rear-ending/towing them with an unmanned spacecraft.
A sample of icy soil collected by the robotic arm of NASA’s Phoenix Mars lander is apparently stuck in its scoop, foiling efforts to analyze it.
From equipment installed backwards to problems with the metric system, NASA’s failures can be as fascinating as its successes. Of course, more cynical critics might suggest that NASA’s failures overshadow its successes — but let’s see you send a ship to the moon.
This image of the Antennae galaxies is the sharpest yet of this merging pair of galaxies.During the course of the collision,billions of stars will be formed. The brightest and most compact of these star birth regions are called super star clusters.The two spiral galaxies started to interact a few 100 million years ago,making the Antennae galaxies..
Over its lifetime, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has captured many stunning images. Among the most memorable is this edge-on mosaic of the Sombrero galaxy. With its relatively high brightness magnitude and at a distance of 28 million light-years from Earth, Messier 104, as Sombrero is more formally known, is easily viewed through a small telescope.