The fans and channels hint that impacts such as Mojave's may have unleashed water or water-ice from the subsurface to flow across the surface and, perhaps, condense as rain or snow for a brief period of Martian time.
Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo made its first captive carry flight early this morning at the Mojave Air and Space Port. SpaceShipTwo, which was christened the VSS Enterprise at its unveiling in December, is being carried by WhiteKnightTwo on its firs
Space Exploration Technologies successfully test fired its Falcon 9 rocket this weekend, clearing a milestone toward the inaugural flight of a privately developed spaceship to fly cargo, and possibly astronauts, into orbit, the company said.
Captain Kirk might want to avoid taking the starship Enterprise to warp speed, unless he's ready to shrug off interstellar hydrogen atoms that would deliver a lethal radiation blast to both ship and crew.
There are just two hydrogen atoms per cubi
Future Mars outposts or colonies may seem more distant than ever with NASA's exploration plans in flux, but the rocket technology that could someday propel a human mission to the red planet in as little as 40 days may already exist.
A giant asteroid smashing into Earth is the only plausible explanation for the extinction of the dinosaurs, a global scientific team said on Thursday, hoping to settle a row that has divided experts for decades.
His concept sketches for Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Disney’s The Black Hole, and iconic poster art for Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey, McCall’s visions of the final frontier were used by NASA and the Postal Service
Before a new launch vehicle is cleared for liftoff from Cape Canaveral, federal regulators and Air Force officials meticulously go over the rocket's safety systems to verify the mission will pose no danger to the public.
By smashing gold particles together at super-fast speeds, physicists have basically melted protons, creating a kind of "quark soup" of matter that is about 250,000 times hotter than the center of the sun and similar to conditions just after the birth
The Hubble Space Telescope has returned the most detailed images of Pluto ever taken reveal the strange mini-world in near true-life color, the surface appears reddish, yellowish, grayish in places, with a mysterious bright spot that is particularly
Getting to space is about to be outsourced. Obama proposes spending billions of dollars to encourage private companies to build, launch and operate spacecraft for NASA and others. Uncle Sam would buy its astronauts a ride into space,
High-energy bursts of gamma rays typically occur far out in space, perhaps near black holes or other high-energy cosmic phenomena. So imagine scientists' surprise when they found these powerful gamma ray flashes happening on Earth,
After six years of unprecedented exploration of the Red Planet, NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit no longer will be a fully mobile robot. NASA has designated the once-roving scientific explorer a stationary science platform after efforts during th
The idea may sound heretical to one of most deeply held tenets in physics, which states that the speed of light is the ultimate speed limit. But the new proposal squeaks by on a loophole in that rule, which insists only that no mass or information ex
With two prototype modules for a commercial space station already circling the Earth, Bigelow Aerospace is gearing up for a full-scale assault on space.
For the upstart firm, it's about volume — and not entirely in the sense of quantity or number
Astronomers have detected a giant magnetic loop sweeping out from a pair of binary stars in the Milky Way. "This is the first time we've seen a feature like this in the magnetic field of any star other than the sun," said William Peterson of the Univ
A mysterious ribbon spotted on the edge of the solar system has turned out to be a reflection of particles streaming off the sun, scientists have found. The space ribbon — a long band of high-energy particle emissions — was first noticed last year
A mystery object from space is about to whizz close by Earth on Wednesday. It won't hit our planet, but scientists are stumped by what exactly it is. It may be space junk or it could be a tiny asteroid, too small to cause damage even if it hit. It's
The Hubble Space Telescope has taken the deepest look into the universe peering back as far as Hubble can look, to about 600 million to 800 million years after the theoretical Big Bang. The universe is about 13.7 billion years old.
Joseph Shoer, Ph.D. candidate in aerospace engineering, studying how modular spacecraft could be assembled, and hoping they will be the telescopes and human exploration vehicles of the future, and not for crushing the dreams of Martian colonists.
Voyager 2's vantage shows that beyond the solar system, the galaxy's magnetic field is unexpectedly strong, about twice as much as expected, and unexpectedly tilted. Our galaxy is essentially a twin-armed flat disk of stars 100,000 light years across
The SpaceX team kicked off 2010 with the successful full duration orbit insertion firing of the Falcon 9 second stage at our Texas test site. This was the final stage firing required for launch, so the second stage will soon be packaged for shipment
"We discovered a vertical hole on the moon," an international team of scientists announced. The gaping, dark pit on the near side of the moon is as big as a city block and deep as a modest skyscraper. It is thought to be a collapsed lava tube,
In 20 years, we might REALLY be having a bad Friday the 13th. The asteroid Apophis is back in the news with the head of Russia’s Space Agency announcing a project to find ways to counteract the asteroid before it “collides” with the earth. Here’s wh
MOSCOW – Russia's space chief said Wednesday his agency will consider sending a spacecraft to a large asteroid to knock it off its path and prevent a possible collision with Earth.
The United States has launched a national security investigation into the proposed sale of a stake in Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic space company to Arab investors.
We've seen concepts and a rare look behind the scenes during assembly, and now in the flesh: Raising champagne glasses in the shadow of a full-size ice statue of an Apollo astronaut, a group of soon-to-be space tourists joined Sir Richard Branson at