Editors' Picks
What the astronauts really said
Apollo "onboard voice" recordings captured the moon astronauts' conversations -- cussing and all -- when no one else was listening.
Drones for Hire
The newest eyes in the sky are drawing the attention of power companies, conservation groups, and the ACLU.
Five Reasons to Like NASA’s Asteroid Retrieval Mission
So it's not the Moon or Mars. Get over it.
The Invention of Flight
Inventors, dreamers, daredevils, charlatans: Aviation's early years had them all.
Disaster at Xichang
An eyewitness speaks publicly for the first time about history’s worst launch accident.
Page 27 of 45
Photographer Eric Curry shows how he made our March 2010 cover.
March 01, 2010
| By The Editors
For the scientists and engineers who drive the Spirit and Opportunity rovers, Mars exploration is personal.
March 2010
| By Michael Klesius
At the recent American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington D.C., astronomers Peter Garnavich of the University of Notre Dame and Alex Filippenko of the University of California at Berkley described a whopping stellar explosion called Y-155. It started out as a Humpty Dumpty of a star, about ...
January 19, 2010
| By Mike Klesius
Planetary scientist Dan Durda was the co-leader of a two-day training course held this week at the National AeroSpace Training and Research (NASTAR) Center for scientists who want to learn the ropes of suborbital spaceflight.Durda sent back these dispatches from the NASTAR center in Pennsylvania.
D...
January 13, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
Christian Frei's film "Space Tourists" makes its North American premiere at the Sundance Film Festival next week. Frei, whose documentary about war photographer James Nachtwey was nominated for an Academy Award in 2002, followed Anousheh Ansari's visit to the space station in 2006 (she shot much of...
January 12, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
Deciphering the cratering history of the Moon is an important scientific problem. My previous post discussed early lunar cratering history, the apparent impact “cataclysm” 3.8 billion years ago, its significance to Earth’s early history and how remaining questions might be resolved by collecting a...
January 11, 2010
| By Paul D. Spudis
NASA recently announced that it has down-selected three New Frontiers mission concepts for additional study. One of these missions, Moonrise, proposes to return rock and soil samples from the floor of the largest impact crater on the Moon, the South Pole-Aitken (SPA) basin, centered on the souther...
January 09, 2010
| By Paul D. Spudis
It's nice when an expensive new machine works as advertised—nicer still when that machine has the ability to revolutionize a whole field of science.At this week's meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington, scientists couldn't stop gushing about the exquisite performance of NASA's K...
January 08, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
The other day we posted some of Arthur C. Clarke's philosophical words on the fate of human evolution, with the caveat that his predictions were still far into the future.But here's a neat video of astronaut Timothy Kopra on the International Space Station on August 15, 2009, conducting an experime...
December 31, 2009
| By Mike Klesius
In the three years since film director James Cameron wrote the script for his new blockbuster Avatar, a lot has changed in the field of exoplanet research (the study of planets around other stars). Nobody knows this better than one of its leading practitioners, Lisa Kaltenegger of the Harvard-Smith...
December 30, 2009
| By Tony Reichhardt
In the novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, written as Stanley Kubrick was adapting it to a screenplay for his 1968 film, author Arthur C. Clarke philosophizes deeply on the convergence of man and machine. While the human astronauts Frank Poole and David Bowman affect an almost robot-like discipline and de...
December 28, 2009
| By Mike Klesius
The Cassini probe to Saturn and Titan is just one of those spacecraft that keeps returning very cool stuff, such as the beautiful view of Saturn during its equinox a few months ago.Now, the mission has just released tantalizing footage of Saturn's moon Janus, which is about 111 miles across, overta...
December 24, 2009
| By Mike Klesius
The pioneering cosmonaut who dreamed of interstellar flight.
December 18, 2009
| By Tony Reichhardt
Announcements of newly discovered planets come so frequently these days that it's hard to tell which ones are significant. But GJ 1214b deserves its moment of fame.Discovered by a team led by David Charbonneau of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the planet is only 5.4 times the diam...
December 17, 2009
| By Tony Reichhardt
In 1982, the idea that a chunk of rock could be hurled from the moon to Earth by a lunar impact was considered pretty far out. For one thing, wouldn't such a massive, high-energy explosion destroy the evidence by turning the excavated rocks to glass? Besides, meteorites were well known to come from...
December 16, 2009
| By Tony Reichhardt
Hot rumor has it that, like Christmas, the Obama Administration’s response to the Augustine Committee Report, Seeking a Human Space Program Worthy of a Great Nation, is imminent. Much excitement is discernible in the space blogosphere that a major change is at hand.The Augustine Committee report c...
December 16, 2009
| By Paul D. Spudis
NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden’s talk at a Women in Aerospace luncheon in Washington D.C. this week is worth watching. Four months into his tenure, Bolden seems as committed as ever to using NASA—and his own example—to push education and diversity.He also had interesting things to say about inte...
December 11, 2009
| By Tony Reichhardt
In 45 years of photographing Mars up close, no spacecraft had ever gotten a picture of both its moons, Phobos (Fear) and Deimos (Dread), together—until last month.The High Resolution Stereo Camera on Europe's Mars Express orbiter took advantage of a rare alignment to snap this image of the two moon...
December 11, 2009
| By Tony Reichhardt
Sure it's pretty, and sure it boggles the mind, but maybe the most astonishing thing about the Hubble Deep Field image is that some scientists were initially against it. To quote from an article in our August/September 1996 issue:For Robert Williams, using the Hubble Space Telescope to peer deeply...
December 08, 2009
| By Tony Reichhardt
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