Space Exploration News – Latest Headlines

Sweet building blocks of life found around young star

Life is made up of a series of complex organic molecules, including sugars. A team of astronomers led by researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute, have now observed a simple sugar molecule in the gas surrounding a young star and this discovery proves that the building blocks of life were already present during planet formation.

August 29, 2012 Read more

Space-warping white dwarfs produce gravitational waves

Gravitational waves, much like the recently discovered Higgs boson, are notoriously difficult to observe. Scientists first detected these ripples in the fabric of space-time indirectly, using radio signals from a pulsar-neutron star binary system. The find, which required exquisitely accurate timing of the radio signals, garnered its discoverers a Nobel Prize. Now a team of astronomers has detected the same effect at optical wavelengths, in light from a pair of eclipsing white dwarf stars.

August 28, 2012 Read more

Scientists surprised by what's under Moon's surface

Immersed deep within the moon is much more water - maybe 100 times more - than scientists ever suspected. This finding by a team of researchers means the moon's interior may resemble the Earth's.

August 27, 2012 Read more

Supernovae of the same brightness, cut from vastly different cosmic cloth

Berkeley Lab researchers make historic observation of rare Type 1a Supernova.

August 24, 2012 Read more

Spacetime: A smoother brew than we knew

Spacetime may be less like beer and more like sipping whiskey. Or so an intergalactic photo finish would suggest.

August 23, 2012 Read more

The Milky Way now has a twin (or two)

Research presented today at the International Astronomical Union General Assembly in Beijing has found the first group of galaxies that is just like ours, a rare sight in the local Universe.

August 23, 2012 Read more

NASA Mars Rover begins driving at Bradbury Landing

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has begun driving from its landing site, which scientists announced today they have named for the late author Ray Bradbury.

August 22, 2012 Read more

Two student rocket payloads set for launch on Aug. 23

A sounding rocket launching from NASA?s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia Aug. 23 will be carrying two University of Colorado Boulder student-built payloads and a pair of other payloads developed by students from Virginia Tech, Baylor University and the University of Puerto Rico.

August 21, 2012 Read more

Researchers gear up for NASA radiation belt space mission

The University of Colorado Boulder will play a key role in a NASA mission launching this week to study how space weather affects Earth?s two giant radiation belts known to be hazardous to satellites, astronauts and electronics systems on Earth.

August 20, 2012 Read more

ChemCam laser sets its sights on first Martian target

Rock zapper ready after beaming back images of calibration targets.

August 17, 2012 Read more

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.

August 17, 2012 Read more

MIT-developed 'microthrusters' could propel small satellites

As small as a penny, these thrusters run on jets of ion beams.

August 17, 2012 Read more

NASA 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.

August 16, 2012 Read more

Hubble 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.

August 16, 2012 Read more

Exoplanet 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.

August 16, 2012 Read more

NASA 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.

August 16, 2012 Read more

Phoenix 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.

August 15, 2012 Read more

Georgia 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.

August 15, 2012 Read more