ChemCam laser sets its sights on first Martian target
Rock zapper ready after beaming back images of calibration targets.
Aug 17th, 2012
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Space Exploration News – Latest Headlines
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Magnetic turbulence trumps collisions to heat solar wind
New research led by University of Warwick physicist Dr Kareem Osman has provided significant insight into how the solar wind heats up when it should not. The solar wind rushes outwards from the raging inferno that is our Sun, but from then on the wind should only get cooler as it expands beyond our solar system since there are no particle collisions to dissipate energy.
Aug 17th, 2012
Read moreMIT-developed 'microthrusters' could propel small satellites
As small as a penny, these thrusters run on jets of ion beams.
Aug 17th, 2012
Read moreNASA is tracking electron beams from the Sun
In the quest to understand how the world's weather moves around the globe, scientists have had to tease apart different kinds of atmospheric movement, such as the great jet streams that can move across a whole hemisphere versus more intricate, localized flows. Much the same must currently be done to understand the various motions at work in the great space weather system that links the sun and Earth as the sun shoots material out in all directions, creating its own version of a particle sea to fill up the solar system.
Aug 16th, 2012
Read moreHubble watches star clusters on a collision course
Astronomers using data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have caught two clusters full of massive stars that may be in the early stages of merging. The clusters are 170,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small satellite galaxy to our Milky Way.
Aug 16th, 2012
Read moreExoplanet hosting stars give further insights on planet formation
An international team, led by EXOEarths researchers (Centro de Astrofísica da Universidade do Porto - CAUP), proposes that metals like Magnesium might have an important role in the formation of low mass planets.
Aug 16th, 2012
Read moreNASA goes green: NASA selects green propellant technology demonstration mission
NASA has selected a team led by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corporation of Boulder, Colo., for a technology demonstration of a high performance "green" propellant alternative to the highly toxic fuel hydrazine. With this award, NASA opens a new era of innovative and non-toxic green fuels that are less harmful to our environment, have fewer operational hazards, and decrease the complexity and cost of launch processing.
Aug 16th, 2012
Read morePhoenix cluster sets record pace at forming stars
Astronomers have found an extraordinary galaxy cluster, one of the largest objects in the universe, that is breaking several important cosmic records. Observations of the Phoenix cluster with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, the National Science Foundation's South Pole Telescope, and eight other world-class observatories may force astronomers to rethink how these colossal structures and the galaxies that inhabit them evolve.
Aug 15th, 2012
Read moreGeorgia Tech advances potential commercial space flight system (w/video)
Last spring private industry successfully sent a spacecraft carrying cargo to the International Space Station. Now the race is on to see which company will be the first to make commercial human spaceflight a reality.
Aug 15th, 2012
Read moreRecreating a slice of the universe
Scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and their colleagues at the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies (HITS) have invented a new computational approach that can accurately follow the birth and evolution of thousands of galaxies over billions of years. For the first time it is now possible to build a universe from scratch that brims with galaxies like we observe around us.
Aug 15th, 2012
Read moreNew system could predict solar flares, give advance warning
Researchers may have discovered a new method to predict solar flares more than a day before they occur, providing advance warning to help protect satellites, power grids and astronauts from potentially dangerous radiation.
Aug 14th, 2012
Read moreGamma rays from galactic center could be evidence of dark matter
Gamma-ray photons seen emanating from the center of the Milky Way galaxy are consistent with the intriguing possibility that dark-matter particles are annihilating each other in space, according to research by UC Irvine astrophysicists.
Aug 13th, 2012
Read moreKeeping up with Curiosity
When Curiosity touched down safely on Mars on August 5, John Grotzinger, the mission's chief scientist and the Fletcher Jones Professor of Geology at Caltech, was given the 'keys' to the car-sized rover.
Aug 10th, 2012
Read moreDare mighty things: Curiosity on Mars (w/video)
Aug 10th, 2012
Read moreTo the stars: NASA selects small spacecraft technology demonstration missions
NASA has chosen three teams to advance the state of the art for small spacecraft in the areas of communications, formation flying and docking systems. The cutting-edge space technology flights are expected to take place in 2014 and 2015.
Aug 10th, 2012
Read moreNASA's Curiosity beams back a color 360 of Gale Crater
The first images from Curiosity's color Mast Camera, or Mastcam, have been received by scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. The 130 low-resolution thumbnails, which were received Thursday morning, provide scientists and engineers of NASA's newest Mars rover their first color, horizon-to-horizon glimpse of Gale Crater.
Aug 9th, 2012
Read morePlenty of dark matter near the Sun
An international team of researchers used a state-of-the-art simulation of the Milky Way to test their mass-measuring method before applying it to real data. This threw up a number of surprises: they noticed that standard techniques used over the past twenty years were biased, always tending to underestimate the amount of dark matter.
Aug 9th, 2012
Read moreNew 3D map of massive galaxies and black holes offers clues to dark matter, dark energy
Astronomers have constructed the largest-ever three-dimensional map of massive galaxies and distant black holes, which will help the investigation of the mysterious "dark matter" and "dark energy" that make up 96 percent of the universe.
Aug 8th, 2012
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