After almost 9 years in space that included an unprecedented July 4th impact and subsequent flyby of a comet, an additional comet flyby, and the return of approximately 500,000 images of celestial objects, NASA’s Deep Impact mission has ended.
The project team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., has reluctantly pronounced the mission at an end after being … Read the rest of this article
NASA is seeking applications from U.S. graduate students for the agency’s Space Technology Research Fellowships. The research grants, worth as much as $68,000 per year, will coincide with the start of the 2014 fall term.
Applications will be accepted from students pursuing or planning to pursue master’s or doctorate degrees in relevant space technology disciplines at accredited U.S. universities. The … Read the rest of this article
By analyzing the distinctive cracks lining the icy face of Europa, NASA scientists found evidence that this moon of Jupiter likely spun around a tilted axis at some point.
Europa’s tilt could influence calculations of how much of the moon’s history is recorded in its frozen shell, how much heat is generated by tides in its ocean, and even how … Read the rest of this article
Like a dragon breathing fire, a powerful blast of plasma erupts from the Sun in this colourised view of a ‘coronal mass ejection’.
These huge clouds of magnetised plasma are ejected from the Sun’s atmosphere – the corona – and launched into interplanetary space. Millions of tonnes of gas race away from the Sun at several million kilometres per hour.… Read the rest of this article
Comets and other icy celestial bodies have some basic building blocks for life, but it takes violent impacts to take them to the next level, according to researchers who claim to have successfully created amino acids in the lab by recreating icy interplanetary collisions.
First the researchers created mixtures of water ice and light organic chemicals roughly based on what … Read the rest of this article
The Harvest Moon is the full Moon that falls closest to the autumnal equinox, the beginning of northern autumn. In 2013 the Moon is full on Sept. 19th (the night of Sept. 18-19 in North America) while the equinox follows close behind on Sept. 22nd.
Read the full story at MoonFacts.net.… Read the rest of this article
A documentary from National Geographic looks at what Earth would be like without the moon in its regular orbit around the planet. Would life exist on Earth? Or would the climate teeter between cataclysmic extremes?
Watch the video over at Moonfacts.net.… Read the rest of this article
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered the largest known population of globular star clusters, an estimated 160,000, swarming like bees inside the crowded core of the giant grouping of galaxies Abell 1689. By comparison, our Milky Way galaxy hosts about 150 such clusters.
Studying globular clusters is critical to understanding the early, intense star-forming episodes that marked galaxy formation. The … Read the rest of this article
NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft officially is the first human-made object to venture into interstellar space. The 36-year-old probe is about 12 billion miles (19 billion kilometers) from our sun.
New and unexpected data indicate Voyager 1 has been traveling for about one year through plasma, or ionized gas, present in the space between stars. Voyager is in a transitional region … Read the rest of this article
ESA astronaut Jean-François Clervoy and ESA astronaut instructor Hervé Stevenin slipped into the roles of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin last week for an underwater simulation of the historic mission to the Moon.
Training astronauts underwater is an effective way of getting used to the sensations of working in weightlessness for long periods.
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ESA astronaut Jean-François Clervoy collecting a rock …
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The Sun Now (H-Alpha light)
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