The International Space Station (ISS) may be a
remarkable piece of engineering, but it’s so drab that it needs a window
box to brighten things up. That isn't possible in the vacuum of space,
but NASA is doing the next best thing on Monday as it sends its
Vegetable Production System (Veggie) to the space station aboard the
SpaceX Dragon CRS-3 mission. However, this plant-growing chamber will be
more than a horticultural experiment, it's also a bit more culinary as
it lets astronauts put fresh salad on the menu. Read More
Getting hit by a giant asteroid can ruin your
whole day, so the first United States mission to visit an asteroid and
return a sample presents a huge challenge. Lockheed Martin has announced
that NASA’s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification,
Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx)
mission has passed a comprehensive technical review, giving the green
light for Lockheed to begin building the spacecraft in anticipation of a
launch in 2016. Read More
ESA has released compelling video footage
displaying the ascent of its Sentinel 1A satellite as viewed from
external cameras mounted on the Soyuz Fregat launch vehicle which
carried it into orbit. Read More
Vancouver-based company UrtheCast
has released the first images taken from its medium-resolution camera
(MRC), following the installation of two British-manufactured cameras to
the outer hull of the ISS on Jan. 27 of this year. The cameras will
allow the Canadian company to provide users with a near-live stream of
Earth in stunning detail around the clock. Read More
If you've ever wanted to own a space suit from
the NASA Mercury project, or maybe a pack of gum that went to the Moon,
here’s your chance. On Tuesday, Bonhams auction house is selling a
bumper crop of space exploration artifacts as part of its sixth annual
Space History Sale in New York. The auction will see 296 lots of
memorabilia from the US and Soviet space programs go on the block,
including a Mercury-era space suit. Read More
With a projected settlement date of 2025, the Mars One project
has received over 200,000 applications for the one way trip to the Red
Planet. But creating a living, sustainable community on the distant
planet for the select inhabitants will require not only unique
technological and engineering solutions, but also novel architectural
systems. Bryan Versteeg is a conceptual designer who’s been working with
the Mars One team in anticipation of the planet’s eventual
colonization. Read More
The EU has launched the first satellite as part
of its Copernicus Earth observation program. Copernicus will provide a
means of monitoring Earth's sub-systems, the atmosphere, oceans, and
continental surfaces. The Sentinel 1A satellite was launched from French
Guiana at 23:02 on Thursday April 3rd. Read More
Another lunar mission is drawing to a close, if
not with a bang, then a thump. On Thursday, NASA held a press conference
to discuss the final weeks of the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) mission before the spacecraft makes a controlled impact on the far side of the Moon on or before April 21. Read More
With the use of its Cassini spacecraft and the
Deep Space Orbiting Network, NASA has potentially discovered evidence
for the presence of an ocean of liquid water locked away beneath the
thick, icy crust of Saturn's moon, Enceladus. Read More
The Ukraine crisis reached into space yesterday
as NASA confirmed that it is cutting ties with the Russian space
program. With the exception of continued cooperation aimed at keeping
the International Space Station (ISS) operating, the agency says that in
response to Russia’s annexation of the Crimea, it will no longer
participate with its Russian counterparts on projects, bilateral visits
or communications. Read More
Scientists confirm the discovery of the first ringed minor planet
By Anthony Wood
March 31, 2014
With the use of seven telescopes spread across
South America, observers have confirmed the unlikely discovery of a
double ring surrounding the minor planet Chariklo, which holds orbit
between Saturn and Uranus. Previously rings have only been found around
giant planets, the most dramatic of which, Saturn, shines easily visible
to the naked eye in the night sky. Read More
SpaceX’s Dragon CRS-3 mission to the
International Space Station (ISS) has once again been scrubbed. On
Friday, NASA confirmed that the launch of the unmanned cargo ship has
been delayed due to the failure of a tracking radar, which meant that
the launch could not meet the minimum public safety requirements. Read More
Scientists from the Carnegie Institution for
Science and the Gemini Observatory have reported the existence of a new
member of our solar system. The distant dwarf planet, dubbed 2012 VP113,
is believed to be one of thousands of distant objects that make up the
hypothesized "inner Oort cloud." Read More
For over forty years, Earthwatch
has been sending ordinary people to extraordinary places in the company
of top scientists to conduct hands-on research in over 50 expeditions.
On Thursday, the international nonprofit organization announced its most
ambitious and extraordinary public expedition ever aimed at sending
volunteers to Mars in search for water and life. With its US$1.25
million ticket price, it seems too good to be true, and probably is.
Read More
NASA asks public to vote on Z-2 spacesuit design
By David Szondy
March 27, 2014
NASA has gone a touch sartorial as it asks the
public to vote on the design of its new prototype Z-2 spacesuit. Part of
the Advanced Suit development program to come up with a replacement for
the 22-year old suit designs currently used on the International Space
Station, the Z-2 not only includes a number of technical innovations,
but also a design that for the first time has an eye on the aesthetics
of living and working in outer space. Read More
Images from the NASA Spitzer Space Telescope
have been used to create a staggering 20-gigapixel panorama,
encompassing more than half of the galaxy’s stars. The vista was created
from more than a decade’s worth of infrared images, and will be used to
help further our understanding of the structure and formation of stars
in the Milky Way. Read More
Apparently NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)
in Pasadena, California, thinks that what space exploration in the 21st
century needs is spacecraft that are a bit more botanical. The center
has released a video showing off its starshade spacecraft that opens up
like a blossom. Bearing a resemblance to a cosmic sunflower, it’s
designed to help astronomers to directly study exoplanets, including
taking the first actual pictures of planets beyond our Solar System.
Read More
It’s been five years since NASA’s $600 million Kepler Space Telescope was launched to look for planets beyond our Solar System – so-called exoplanets
– and while the quest to find a twin for Earth has so far been
fruitless, Kepler’s observations have revealed our galaxy to be full of
worlds potentially able to support life. Read More
NASA, using images taken from its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter
(LRO) has released a 680-gigapixel interactive mosaic of the Moon's
north polar region. The resolution of the image is one pixel to 6.5 ft
(2 m) with the area imaged being the equivalent of slightly more than
the land mass of the states of Alaska and Texas combined. Read More
![Artist's impression of HR 5171 A [1] (Image: ESO)](http://images.gizmag.com/hero/hr5171a1.jpg "Artist's impression of HR 5171 A [1] (Image: ESO)")
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Researchers from King's College London working
with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have produced a
skinsuit which, if worn by astronauts in outer space, could counteract
the degradation of bone and muscle mass during long term exposure to
microgravity. Read More
Lockheed-Martin (LM) has a problem. Their Atlas V
orbital launch system, while very popular with the US military, at
around US$225M per launch is too expensive to compete effectively for
commercial missions, whose launch costs are generally about half that
amount. As part of an effort to reposition their services, LM is now
offering a 100 percent money-back or reflight guarantee if the launch
vehicle causes mission failure. The guarantee covers the cost of the
vehicle launch, but not the cost of the satellite. Read More
SpaceX has delayed the scheduled launch of the third commercial flight of its unmanned Dragon
cargo ship to the International Space Station (ISS). The launch, which
was originally scheduled for Sunday, March 16 at 4:41 AM EDT from Launch
Complex 40 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida, would have
been the first mission of the Falcon 9 launch vehicle with its landing
legs. Read More
The European Space Observatory's Very Large
Telescope (VLT) has spotted a massive yellow star with a diameter of
more than 1,300 times the size of the Sun. The star is also a part of a
binary system, with a companion star orbiting so close that it is
actually in physical contact with the giant. Read More
Controlling a robot in space from the ground can
be a bit like hitting a moving target. There’s a one to three second
delay as data passes back and forth between the robot and ground
control, which means that operators have to anticipate how the robots
will move during these delays. This week, the Lockheed Martin Advanced
Technology Center (ATC) announced the first-ever demonstration of
collaborative tele-operations that involved control of robots on the
International Space Station (ISS) by astronauts on the ISS and operators
on the ground. Read More
Crew members of Expedition 38 have safely
returned to Earth, their Soyuz capsule setting down in Kazakhstan on
Mar. 10 at 11:24 p.m. EDT. The astronauts and cosmonauts spent 116 days
in space, carrying out a wide range of experiments and successfully
executing multiple space walks. Read More
As you might expect, acquiring a signal from a
satellite traveling at speeds of over 17,400 mph can be a tricky
business. A new system called SARAS, which is a Spanish acronym for
"Fast Acquisition of Satellites and Launchers," more than doubles the
effective area of the receiving dish antenna, allowing the signal to be
acquired much faster. Read More
A study of data captured by NASA's Wide-Field
Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) satellite has disproved the existence of
the hypothesized large celestial body, dubbed "Planet X." The planet or
companion star was, some believed, responsible for the periodic mass
extinctions that have taken place in Earth's past. Read More
Astronauts, get your welding goggles on – the
space station is going into the foundry business. The International
Space Station is set to do a spot of industrial research this June, when
ESA’s Materials Science Laboratory-Electromagnetic Levitator heads for
the station aboard Europe's’ ATV-5 Georges Lemaître unmanned space
freighter as part of a program to study the casting of alloys in a
weightless environment. Read More
Getting into space is an expensive business where
every little bit of extra weight, which includes the fuel powering the
spacecraft, can add thousands of dollars to the cost of a mission. A
team of researchers at MIT proposes establishing gas stations in space
as a possible way to help cut the cost of future missions to the Moon.
Read More
Five international teams are moving forward from a
field of 33 proposals with the goal of performing a robotic landing on
the moon, followed by a short drive and high-quality video mooncast, all
as part of the Google Lunar XPrize competition to incentivize a new
novel, low-cost era of lunar exploration. Read More
The Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) Core Observatory
was launched last Thursday aboard a Japanese H-IIA rocket that blasted
off from Tanegashima Space Center on Tanegashima Island in southern
Japan. Weighing in at 4-ton, the GPM is the largest spacecraft ever
built at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and will help provide a more
detailed picture of the Earth's precipitation to assist climate
scientists and help improve forecasting of extreme weather events. Read More
Space fishing: ESA floats plan to net space junk
By David Szondy
February 28, 2014
With the film Gravity hoovering up
awards for its portrayal of astronauts dodging colliding satellites, now
seems a good time to talk about the very real threat posed by space
debris. It’s small wonder, then, that ESA’s Clean Space initiative is
looking at developing a satellite that can rendezvous with space debris
and render it harmless by netting it like fish. The proposal is just
one of the ideas to be discussed as part of a symposium this May
focusing on the space agency's e.DeOrbit mission. Read More
The commander of the last Space Shuttle mission
recently returned to space, but never left the ground. No, this isn’t
one of those annoying lateral thinking puzzles. Chris Ferguson,
commander of the STS-135 Atlantis mission in 2011 and currently director
of Crew and Mission Operations at Boeing, went on a virtual flight to
the International Space Station (ISS) in a ground-based simulator as
part of NASA’s testing requirements for Boeing’s Crew Space Transportation (CST)-100 spacecraft. Read More
International Space Station's SPHERES robots to get new smarts
By David Szondy
February 27, 2014
If you want to know how big the crew of the
International Space Station (ISS) is at present, the answer depends on
whether or not you’re counting the robots on board. Some of the
non-human residents will soon be getting smarter, with NASA announcing
that the Synchronized Position Hold, Engage, Reorient, Experimental
Satellites (SPHERES)
robots currently on the station will later this year get a new
smartphone. The increased capability of the soon to be Smart SPHERES is
designed to help transition them from engineering testbeds to workaday
companions that can take over some of the duties of the station
astronauts. Read More
Kepler strikes exoplanet mother lode, 715 new planets discovered
By David Szondy
February 27, 2014
It’s a good thing that planets outside our Solar
System get catalog designations instead of proper names, or space
scientists would now be scraping the barrel for “Ralph” or “Tigger.”
That’s because on Wednesday, NASA announced that the Kepler
space telescope had hit the “motherload” of exoplanets, confirming 715
new planets in 315 star systems. It used a new statistical technique
that the space agency says has removed a bottleneck that has plagued the
analysis of the Kepler data. Read More
NASA scientists create first geological map of Ganymede
By Anthony Wood
February 25, 2014
NASA scientists have produced the first global
geological map of Jupiter's largest moon Ganymede by combining images
from over twenty years of observation by the Voyager spacecraft and the
Galileo orbiter. Read More
NuSTAR gives tantalizing hints about how stars go supernova
By Anthony Wood
February 21, 2014
NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array
(NuSTAR) is unraveling the mystery of how stars go supernova by mapping
the remnants of radioactive material left in the wake of a supernova.
The findings go against previous theories to create a more chaotic view
of the conditions prevailing directly before a star explodes. Read More
Kepler demonstrates that it can still detect planets
By David Szondy
February 19, 2014
Last year, it looked as though the Kepler space
probe had nothing to look forward to but the scrap heap. After the
failure of two of its reaction wheels, the unmanned spacecraft was
incapable of maintaining the precision pointing needed to hunt planets
beyond the Solar System. Now, however, NASA’s Kepler team has
demonstrated that space telescope can still detect exoplanets thanks the K2 mission concept maneuver. Read More
Bad moon rising: Astronomers explain "full moon curse"
By Brian Dodson
February 16, 2014
The full moon has long been associated with any
number of superstitions. While links with lunacy, violence, fertility,
disasters, and the stock market have been thoroughly debunked, the
possibility of a causative role in some arenas still remains a
possibility. A lunar ranging study carried out using reflectors has
long contended with the "Full-Moon Curse," a near-total fading of
reflected signals during the full Moon. This Curse is real, and has now
been explained. Read More
NASA has solved the mystery of the "Martian jelly
doughnut." First seen by the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity on
January 8, the 1.5-in wide, white-rimmed, red-centered rock that
resembles a piece of pastry seemingly appeared out of nowhere, but the
space agency now says that it's actually a rock fragment dislodged by
the rover's passing. Read More
Quantum physics likes the cold. In particular,
macroscopic quantum phenomena such as superconductivity, superfluidity,
and Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) are only found at quite low
temperatures. While current refrigeration methods can attain
temperatures of a few nanoKelvins, attaining still lower temperatures is
largely prevented by the need to support the cooling matter against the
pull of Earth's gravity. Now NASA's Cold Atom Lab, scheduled for
installation on the ISS in 2016, will aim for temperatures roughly four
orders of magnitude smaller. Read More
NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has
transmitted further measurements of curious seasonal marks on the
surface of Mars. They could be the most compelling evidence yet of
flowing water existing on the Red Planet in the present day. Read More
Curiosity Rover has cleared a sand dune that has
barred the mission's progress since January 30th. The dune, roughly
three feet (one meter) in height, stood between two scarps. It
effectively blocked the way forward to Dingo Gap, the Rover's next
immediate destination before proceeding to the drill site designated
KMS-9. Read More
Oldest known star in the Universe discovered
By Darren Quick
February 10, 2014
A team of astronomers at The Australian National
University (ANU) working on a five-year project to produce the first
comprehensive digital survey of the southern sky has discovered the
oldest known star in the Universe. Just a 6,000 light year astronomical
hop, skip and jump from Earth, the ancient star formed shortly after the
Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago. Read More
On Jan. 27, two Russian Cosmonauts undertook a
six hour spacewalk in order to install two new British-manufactured
Earth imaging cameras to the Russian segment of the ISS. The initiative,
announced in 2011,
will allow anyone with an internet connection access to the near-live
feed, which will provide higher quality results than the
currently-installed standard definition cameras. Read More
Sometimes history is preserved by accident rather
than design. Thanks to a malfunction during the Apollo 15 mission in
1971 that prevented it from being abandoned with its fellows, the only
camera used on the surface of the Moon and brought back to Earth will be
auctioned by Westlicht Photographica Auction in Vienna. The
motor-driven camera is a Hasselblad 500 "EL DATA CAMERA HEDC," also
known as a Hasselblad Data Camera (HDC), that was specially designed for
use on the Moon. It’s currently in the hands of a private collector and
goes on the block in March. Read More
Commercial spaceflight training provider receives FAA safety approval
By Stu Robarts
January 31, 2014
Individuals who dream of becoming astronauts will
soon be able to buy training for exactly that purpose. Spaceflight
training provider Waypoint 2 Space has been awarded safety approval by
the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for its training programs
which are due to begin this year. According to the company, it is the
only US-based organization that will be providing,"fully comprehensive
and immersive spaceflight training programs for both suborbital and
orbital space." Read More
GPM satellite to usher in a new era of weather observation
By Anthony Wood
January 30, 2014
NASA is set to launch a new satellite designed to
take detailed, near real-time measurements of rain and snowfall on a
global scale whilst mapping the interior of storm systems. The Core
Observatory of the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) has been in
development since 2005 and is a collaboration project between NASA and
the Japanese Space Agency (JAXA). The satellite is due to be launched on
the Japanese manufactured H-IIA delivery vehicle from the Tanegashima
Space Centre, Tanegashima Island, Japan, on February 27. Read More
Alpha Centauri B may have "superhabitable" worlds
By David Szondy
January 27, 2014
Since Earth is the only known inhabited planet
and we happen to live here, it’s only natural to regard it as the ideal
place for life to exist, and to assume that another life-bearing planet
would be fairly similar. However, that is not the opinion of scientists
René Heller and John Armstrong who contend that there might be a planet
even more suitable for life than Earth 4.3 light years away orbiting the
star Alpha Centauri B. Read More
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