It’s 72 and sunny on Kepler-22b! Well, maybe. The Kepler Telescope team has announced confirmation of a terrestrial planet orbiting a G-class star (same type as our star) in the habitable orbit zone. The planet, dubbed Kepler-22b, is a little over twice the size of Earth, and orbits its host...
The new Mars rover Curiosity has successfully launched and is now well on its way to the Red Planet. The 9 month journey will (hopefully) conclude in a successful landing and an awesome 2 year (plus) mission to explore the Gale Crater for evidence of microbial life. Here’s the launch....
This is a fantastic video produced onboard the International Space Station while orbiting 250 miles above the Earth at 17,500 miles per hour. The video was put together by NASA Astronaut Ron Garan. It is absolutely stunning in every way. Just click play, make sure HD is on, click the...
This is perhaps the greatest tribute to America’s Space Shuttle program that I have yet seen. An 8 minute video from Nature Videos (of the Nature science journal), it highlights every mission in the 30 year program–it’s good times and bad times, it’s triumphs and it’s tragedies. So turn up...
The Space Shuttle Atlantis landed this morning at 5:56am EDT on July 21, 2011, bringing to a close the halcyon days of Mankind’s exploration of space. Okay, I suppose it is a bit too harsh to say that this end’s the human exploration of space. The point is simply that,...
On July 20th, 2011, the Space Shuttle Atlantis will touch down after a 12 day mission, marking the end of an era. Never again will one of these distinguished spacecraft grace the launch pad of Cape Canaveral, rocket through the sky above the Atlantic, or reach onward to that great...
Big news in science and astronomy, so I can’t pass it up. The Keplar space telescope has recently discovered its first small, rocky exoplanet, designated Kepler-10b, located some 560 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus. The host star is about 11 billion years old, and unfortunately the planet is...
The United Nation is set to appoint Mrs. Mazlan Othman, the current Director of the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (or UNOOSA), to serve as Earth’s official ambassador in the event of extraterrestrial contact. Until now, no one person had been designated for this task, and the exact...
Wow. We all knew the launch of the Kepler Telescope would likely reveal a few interesting Earth-like planets that might be capable of harboring life. I don’t think anyone expect hundreds of Earth-like planet candidates to be discovered within a year of its operation. But no one, not even NASA,...
It is now the year 2010. Looking back at my childhood, I recall how excited I was about this year. In the 1980s, the year 2010 was envision as the beginning of brilliant era of manned space exploration and scientific discovery. We would have numerous orbiting space stations, a permanent...
