Archive for the 'Space' Category
A Recently Discovered Bacterium Thrives in NASA’s Spacecraft Clean Rooms
November 8th, 2013Via: JPL: A rare, recently discovered microbe that survives on very little to eat has been found in two places on Earth: spacecraft clean rooms in Florida and South America. Microbiologists often do thorough surveys of bacteria and other microbes in spacecraft clean rooms. Fewer microbes live there than in almost any other environment on […]
Scientists Estimate 4.4 Billion Earth-Like Planets in Milky Way Galaxy
November 5th, 2013Via: Bloomberg: About 4.4 billion planets are similar to Earth in size and temperature, suggesting they may be able to host life, according to a survey of the galaxy using telescopes operating in space and on the ground. The number is an estimate based on information taken from 42,000 stars similar to the Earth’s sun […]
DARPA to Start Reusable Launch Vehicle Program
September 18th, 2013Via: Space News: The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is about to start a program to develop a reusable first stage that could be used to launch medium-sized satellites for as little as $5 million each. Speaking Sept. 12 at the AIAA Space 2013 conference in San Diego, Pam Melroy, deputy director of […]
Moon Water Discovery Hints at Mystery Source Deep Underground
August 29th, 2013Via: Space.com: Evidence of water spotted on the moon’s surface by a sharp-eyed spacecraft likely originated from an unknown source deep in the lunar interior, scientists say. The find — made by NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper instrument aboard India’s Chandrayaan-1 probe — marks the first detection of such “magmatic water” from lunar orbit and confirms […]
New Mexico: Scientology’s ‘Alien Space Cathedral and Spaceship Landing Pad’
August 17th, 2013Wow! haha Man, this is a good one. Via: Daily Mail: MailOnline can today reveal the first close-up pictures of the Church of Scientology’s ‘alien space cathedral’ built in a remote part of the New Mexico desert. The mysterious building which leads to an underground vault sits next to two giant symbols carved into the […]
Voyager 1 At Edge Of Solar System: ‘We Essentially Have Absolutely No Reliable Roadmap Of What To Expect At This Point’
June 28th, 2013Via: Wired: “The models that have been thought to predict what should happen are all incorrect,” said physicist Stamatios Krimigis of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, who is lead author of one of three new papers on Voyager appearing in Science on June 27. “We essentially have absolutely no reliable roadmap of what […]
Moon Mining Race Under Way
March 8th, 2013Via: BBC: Space exploration has long been about reaching far off destinations but now there is a race to exploit new frontiers by mining their minerals. Google has offered a $20m grand prize to the first privately-funded company to land a robot on the moon and explore the surface by moving at least 500 metres […]
Chelyabinsk Meteor Was Largest to Hit the Earth in Over a Century
February 19th, 2013Via: Wall Street Journal: The meteor that crashed to earth in Russia was about 55 feet in diameter, weighed around 10,000 tons and was made from a stony material, scientists said, making it the largest such object to hit the Earth in more than a century. Large pieces of it have yet to be found. […]
Large Quasar Group 4 Billion Light-Years Across; ‘Should not Exist’
January 12th, 2013Via: MSNBC: Astronomers have discovered the largest known structure in the universe, a clump of active galactic cores that stretches 4 billion light-years from end to end. The structure is a large quasar group (LQG), a collection of extremely luminous galactic nuclei powered by supermassive central black holes. This particular group is so large that […]
What Did Google Earth Spot in the Chinese Desert?
January 11th, 2013Via: Wired: Late last month, former CIA analyst Allen Thomson was clicking through a space news website when he noticed a story about a new orbital tracking site being built near the small city of Kashgar in southwestern China. Curious, he went to Google Earth to find it. He poked around for a while, with […]
