Space Exploration News – Latest Headlines

NASA launches interactive website to design interplanetary missions

A small group of engineers at NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., have launched a new web-based tool for scientists and engineers to use when designing spacecraft trajectories to interplanetary destinations.

March 5, 2013 Read more

Gravitational telescope creates space invader mirage

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope is one of the most powerful available to astronomers, but sometimes it too needs a helping hand. This comes in the form of Einstein's general theory of relativity, which makes galaxy clusters act as natural lenses, amplifying the light coming from very distant galaxies.

March 5, 2013 Read more

Announcing the Third International Lunar Superconductor Applications Workshop

Flexure Engineering has invited specialists from around the world in fields of cold temperature electronics, DeepCrypo Engineering, Lunar science, and space entrepreneurship to take part in the Third Annual International Lunar Superconductor Applications Workshop.

March 5, 2013 Read more

Cutting through the spin on supermassive black holes

Astronomers have measured the spin of a black hole buried in the heart of a galaxy located 56 million light years away, and discovered it was spinning quickly - about as quickly as it could go.

March 4, 2013 Read more

Goddard lab works at extreme edge of cosmic ice

Behind locked doors, in a lab built like a bomb shelter, Perry Gerakines makes something ordinary yet truly alien: ice.

March 4, 2013 Read more

CSI: Milky Way

There is growing evidence that several million years ago the center of the Milky Way galaxy was site of all manner of celestial fireworks and a pair of astronomers from Vanderbilt and Georgia Institute of Technology propose that a single event - a black hole collision - can explain all the "forensic" clues.

March 1, 2013 Read more

Van Allen Probes reveal a new radiation belt around Earth

NASA's Van Allen Probes mission has discovered a previously unknown third radiation belt around Earth, revealing the existence of unexpected structures and processes within these hazardous regions of space.

February 28, 2013 Read more

Young protoplanet discovered?

Exoplanet researchers and cosmologists from ETH Zurich have discovered an object that could be a planet in the making. It would be the first time that scientists have succeeded in observing this process.

February 28, 2013 Read more

Discoveries suggest icy cosmic start for amino acids and DNA ingredients (w/video)

Using new technology at the telescope and in laboratories, researchers have discovered an important pair of prebiotic molecules in interstellar space. The discoveries indicate that some basic chemicals that are key steps on the way to life may have formed on dusty ice grains floating between the stars.

February 28, 2013 Read more

Space telescope Fermi's motion produces a study in spirograph (w/video)

NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope orbits our planet every 95 minutes, building up increasingly deeper views of the universe with every circuit. Now a Fermi scientist has transformed LAT data of a famous pulsar into a mesmerizing movie that visually encapsulates the spacecraft's complex motion.

February 28, 2013 Read more

X-ray space observatory NuSTAR helps solve riddle of black hole spin

Two X-ray space observatories, NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton, have teamed up to measure definitively, for the first time, the spin rate of a black hole with a mass 2 million times that of our sun.

February 27, 2013 Read more

White dwarf supernovae are discovered in Virgo Cluster galaxy and in sky area 'anonymous' (w/video)

Observation of two bright exploding stars improves the astronomical "tape measure" that scientists use to calculate the acceleration of the expansion of the universe.

February 27, 2013 Read more

JUICE - mission to the icy moons of Jupiter

ESA chooses instruments for its Jupiter icy moons explorer.

February 27, 2013 Read more

Impact craters may have been cradles of life

Even comparatively small meteorite impact craters may have played a key role in the origin and evolution of early life on Earth, according to a researcher at The University of Western Australia.

February 26, 2013 Read more

Future evidence for extraterrestrial life might come from dying stars

Even dying stars could host planets with life - and if such life exists, we might be able to detect it within the next decade. This encouraging result comes from a new theoretical study of Earth-like planets orbiting white dwarf stars. Researchers found that we could detect oxygen in the atmosphere of a white dwarf's planet much more easily than for an Earth-like planet orbiting a Sun-like star.

February 26, 2013 Read more

World's smallest space telescope to launch on Monday (w/video)

Canada helps push the boundaries of astronomy with the next wave of smaller satellites.

February 22, 2013 Read more

Journey to the limits of spacetime (w/video)

Black holes shape the growth and death of the stars around them through their powerful gravitational pull and explosive ejections of energy. In a recent Science paper, researchers predicted the formation of accretion disks and relativistic jets that warp and bend more than previously thought, shaped by the extreme gravity of the black hole and by powerful magnetic forces generated by its spin.

February 21, 2013 Read more

Asteroids no match for paint gun, says Prof (w/video)

There is research that is off the wall, some off the charts and some off the planet, such as what an aerospace and physics professor is exploring. It's a plan to deflect a killer asteroid by using paint, and the science behind it is absolutely rock solid, so to speak, so much so that NASA is getting involved and wants to know much more.

February 21, 2013 Read more