Tagged: NASA

Latest Images from Pluto

The latest images of Pluto have been beamed back from the New Horizons probe! You can see the latest image on the New Horizons mission site, or read the article on Space.com. Also, there was a nice informative press conference, so have a look at that as well.

New Horizons Zooms Past Pluto

On July 14th, the New Horizons space probe made history as zipped past Pluto at a blistering 14 km/s (that’s 0.000046% the speed of light, if you’re counting), snapping pictures and taking readings. It will take 16 months for all the images and data to be downloaded, but NASA has...

New Horizons Nearing Pluto

On July 14th, 2015, the New Horizons probe will fly by the (dwarf) planet Pluto, taking photos and readings of this far flung outlier of our solar system, and the most well-known of the Kuiper Belt objects. Here’s a nice video overview of the New Horizons mission, an interesting write-up by...

Orion Spacecraft Is Go!

NASA’s new Orion space capsule has successfully launched and landed in its first-ever test flight. On the morning of Friday, December 5th, at 7:05 am, a Delta IV Heavy rocketed the Orion space capsule 5,800 kilometers (that’s 5.8 megameters) into a high elliptical orbit. After some 5 hours, it then plunged back to...

Warp Drive, Mr. Sulu

Looks like the folk at NASA’s Eagleworks are still hard at work on a possibly plausible faster-than-light system, generally known as an Alcubbierre drive, which is sort-of similar to the warp drive of Star Trek fame. If you have an hour to kill, take a look at this informative talk by NASA’s...

Space is Big. Really Big.

Douglas Adams once said, “Space is big. Really big. ” And the following interactive should help demonstrate “just how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.” (Just use the scroll bar to zoom in and out, and you can click on things too). Interactive by Cary Huang — be sure to...

A New Hubble Deep Field

NASA has released some new Hubble deep field images (apparent done in conjunction with Spitzer), which once again goes to show that, in the immortal words of Douglas Adams, space is big… really big. These images show a vast number of galaxies (every point of light is, in fact, a galaxy)...

Views of Earth from the ISS

Check out this video ,”The World Outside My Window”, a time-lapses of Earth from the International Space Station. Epic. Beautiful. Majestic. And if you liked that one, you’ll also like this one, “All Alone in the Night”:

No Death Star by 2016, Says White House

The White House has just rejected a modest proposal to secure resources and funding to begin construction of a Death Star by 2016.  White House science and technology adviser Paul Shawcross shot down the idea sighting the $850 quadrillion dollar price tag, plus pointing out that the Death Star has...

Private Space Ventures in 2013

The year 2012 marked the first achievement for private space ventures with SpaceX’s docking of their Dragon cargo capsule to the International Space Station (which they in fact did twice). This year (2013), private companies like SpaceX, Sierra Nevada, XCOR, and Virgin Galactic are gearing up to make even greater...