Spacecraft
Sub-orbital, orbital, lunar, interplanetary and interstellar vehicles designed to navigate space- Explore more »
A Steamy Earthlike Planet?
Having already found more than 500 planets circling distant stars, scientists are getting better at understanding what they're made of. A group led by Jacob Bean at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics reports in this week's Nature that they've analyzed the atmosphere of a planet only sl...
December 01, 2010 |
By Tony Reichhardt
Keeping an eye on NASA
Credible rumor has it that NASA has initiated a “lessons learned” postmortem of Project Constellation in order to camouflage their failure to implement the 2004 Vision for Space Exploration (VSE) and to justify their new direction. I had originally intended to expand on the agency’s postmortem pur...
November 21, 2010 |
By Paul D. Spudis
Chinese Moon
What impresses me most about the new photos of the moon taken by the Chinese Chang’e-2 orbiter is not their beauty (although they are pretty) nor their sharpness (NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter returns higher resolution images). It's the fact that they were unveiled by Premier Wen Jiabao (left...
November 10, 2010 |
By Tony Reichhardt
Can NASA Get Its Groove Back?
Remember when space exploration was “groovy” and excitement about seeing humans explore the Solar System within our lifetimes was palpable? What happened to NASA and America’s dream to boldly go? The pathway that assured us that space exploration is cool, amazing and pushes excellence has disap...
November 06, 2010 |
By Paul D. Spudis
Permafrost, Snow Cones and Fairy Castles
Although the discovery of ice on the Moon comes from a wide variety of different measurements, they are all “remote sensing.” We have not yet landed near these deposits and examined them up close. Thus, we do not know the physical nature of lunar polar ice. Having spent the last couple of weeks ...
November 06, 2010 |
By Paul D. Spudis
Close-Ups of Hartley 2
The first close-up photos of Comet Hartley 2 came in this morning from NASA's Epoxi spacecraft. Dramatic!
November 04, 2010 |
By Tony Reichhardt
Data Clippers
Now this is a charming idea, and maybe a handy one too – fleets of solar sails delivering pictures of distant worlds back to the home planet.Data is a valuable commodity in the Information Age, just as spices and silk were in centuries past. So Joel Poncy and his team at Thales Alenia Space have im...
October 28, 2010 |
By Tony Reichhardt
Strange Lunar Brew
A year ago, the LCROSS (Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite) mission team announced the detection of water in the impact plume produced after the Centaur separated from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and crashed into the Moon. We now have more detailed information on the water a...
October 22, 2010 |
By Paul D. Spudis
Three Million Miles in Ten Days
Floating off to sleep, Earthgazing, making sure the capsule doesn't depressurize: all standard on a space vacation.
October 22, 2010 |
By Gregory Olsen
The Authorized Version
NASA’s new authorization bill (S.3729) was passed by Congress before they cleared out of town and will soon be signed by the President, codifying into law the federal government’s formal abandonment of the Vision for Space Exploration. In its place is a mish-mosh of platitudes, entitlement program...
October 07, 2010 |
By Paul D. Spudis
Looking for the High Life
In the wake of several misleading news headlines, researchers at Cranfield University in the U.K. have had to set the record straight: No, they're not looking for aliens in Earth's atmosphere.But they are looking for microbes floating around in the stratosphere, at altitudes up to 22 miles. The...
October 06, 2010 |
By Tony Reichhardt
China Returns to the Moon
China's ambitions in space are often exaggerated and held up as a threat to U.S. preeminence in the field, mostly as a scare tactic to shake more money for NASA out of Congress. A lot of the huffing and puffing you can safely ignore. But the Chinese have made solid progress over the last decade in ...
September 30, 2010 |
By Tony Reichhardt
Look Ma! No Glasses!
A geologist uses topographic maps to measure slopes, depths, heights and the general shape of landforms. To aid in reconstructing the depositional and erosional history of a chosen landscape, the geologist needs to study the shape of features in the given area in quantitative detail in order to un...
September 29, 2010 |
By Paul D. Spudis
NASA v. The Scientists
A band of space scientists and engineers take their fight for privacy all the way to the Supreme Court.
September 24, 2010 |
By Mark Betancourt
SETI @ 50: Are We Getting Anywhere?
Most people date the modern Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) to Frank Drake's Project Ozma, conducted in 1960 using the giant dish at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia.Today through Wednesday, at an NRAO workshop, SETI-ologists will review where th...
September 13, 2010 |
By Tony Reichhardt
Building bridges
The camera aboard NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft, currently about to begin its second year of mapping the Moon, continues to reveal new and fascinating details of the geology of the Moon. A recent featured image at the LROC web site shows what appears to be a “natural bridge” on th...
September 11, 2010 |
By Paul D. Spudis
Forbidden Planet
We’ve been to the moon. Mars is easy. But landing on Venus? That’s tough.
September 2010 |
By Sam Kean
