SPACENASA’s New Horizons space probe is set to make the history books when it flies past Pluto on July 14. Currently, the probe looking closely at the little dwarf planet as it looks for anything that could cause problems for the craft during the final months of its historic mission.
As scientists around the world work feverishly to meet the 2030 deadline for sending humans to Mars, one of their most critical issues - oxygen production - may be solved by two very basic organisms: bacteria and algae.
The last intact section of one of Antarctica’s giant ice shelves is weakening fast and will likely disintegrate in the next few years, contributing to a further rise in sea levels, NASA said in a new study.
Former NASA astronaut Edgar Mitchell, who once walked on the moon, says that he believes that aliens did crash in Roswell, and some of them were captured alive.
While prospecting and mining on the moon or on asteroids is probably a couple of decades away from becoming reality, according to a NASA scientist speaking at a symposium on planetary and terrestrial mining, oversight will be needed by a body much like the United Nations.
NASA is already in the planning stages for a future trip to Mars, and one of the hurdles they must jump is how humans will breath on the Red Planet. However, instead of carrying huge oxygen tanks, future human missions may actually utilize methods to actually produce the life giving gas on the planet itself.
Scientists at NASA have found evidence using laboratory experiments that the dark material that dusts the surface of Europa, Jupiter's ice covered moon, may actually be sea salt from a subsurface ocean.
Following the failed launch of a Russian resupply rocket, NASA and its space agency partners have decided to delay the return of three astronauts from the International Space Station.
The European Space Agency (ESA) has just published a striking picture of Europa, Jupiter's icy moon. In the image the surface looks like shattered glass; it reveals many interlocking cracks in the moon's icy crust which were formed by an ocean below the moon's surface. Now a team from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) led by planetary scientist Kevin Hand has identified the cracks as sea salt.
An asteroid that is approximately one-mile wide will come very close to the Earth on May 14, according to NASA’s Near Earth Object watch. While an asteroid of this size would be cataclysmic if it hit the Earth, this one will pass safely by.
NASA has released the most brilliant images of Ceres to date, truly showcasing the surface of the dwarf planet located in the asteroid belt. The new images could help scientists at NASA finally explain the unusually bright spots that have been puzzling researchers since the first images of the dwarf planet were sent back to Earth.
NASA's Messenger spacecraft orbited Mercury for four years, and in that time it collected a wealth of data and images as it mapped the planet's gravitational field. Now scientists have announced that Mercury's magnetic field is four million years old.
Assuming that NASA receives the funding necessary and makes the technological advances that are needed in space travel, the first humans could land on Phobos, one of the moon's of Mars, by 2033 and on the surface of the Red Planet by 2039, according NASA.
Space may be vast and so large it is often beyond our true comprehension, but our neck of the woods is getting very crowded. Around Earth, there are thousands of satellites both active and inactive often requiring precise control to ensure there are no collisions. While Mars isn't exactly LAX, there are now five different active satellites orbiting it. To prevent any accidental and unfortunate collisions, NASA is now working on a new traffic management system for the Red Planet.
Technology from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) helped search-and-rescue teams find and save four men buried in rubble following the Nepal Earthquake. FINDER, a device no larger than a carry-on suitcase weighing less than 20 pounds, detected the heartbeats of the victims through 10 feet of wood, mud, and brick.
Thanks to the latest from the NASA Hubble Space Telescope astronomers may now be poised to understand the origins of our galaxy more clearly. A team of scientists led by astrophysicist Nicolas Lehner of the University of Notre Dame used the Hubble to find a massive gas halo surrounding the Andromeda Galaxy, our closest neighbor.
Mars is seen as the next frontier for humans. Ever since astronauts first walked on the Moon in 1969, scientists and space enthusiasts alike have dreamed of one day exploring the Red Planet. While we work on new rockets to get us to Mars, scientists are already hard at work thinking about how to build a sustainable colony on Mars. What do we need to survive? That’s the question NASA is asking the public in its latest competition.
As more news about Mars enters our scientific community each day, the importance of making survival on Mars a priority is thrown into sharp relief. No longer remote, science-fiction the goal of transforming Mars for ourselves with technology is at the core of our next endeavor in space.
After days of being pinned beneath up to 10 feet of rubble, four men were rescued in Nepal thanks to NASA search-and-rescue technology. This marks the first real-world use of NASA's advanced sensing technology.