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A key finding was the amount of material deposited into the sun's atmosphere. "The comet dissolved into more than a million tons of electrically charged gas," says Pesnell. "We believe these vapors eventually mixed with the solar wind and blew
A powerful solar eruption is expected to blast a stream of charged particles toward Earth tomorrow (Jan. 24), as the strongest radiation storm since 2005 rages on the sun. Early this morning (0359 GMT Jan. 23, which corresponds to late Sunday, Jan
The Russians are serious about the moon and think the U.S. should be too. Their incentive can be summed up with one word: China. Quite simply, China wants to own the moon. The Russian Federation and its space agency Roscosmos finds itself in the curi
Scientists at the French National Centre for Scientific Research in Paris have published findings in Nature Geoscience that has challenged assumptions about the moon Titan, one of Saturn’s sixty moons and a focus of scientists because of the presence
Russia believes fragments of its Phobos-Grunt probe which spiralled back to Earth after failing to head on a mission to Mars crashed Sunday into the Pacific Ocean, a spokesman for its space forces said.
Russia’s space agency on Sunday called off all predictions of the likely crash site of its ill-fated Mars probe only hours before the 13.5-tonne spacecraft was due to begin its fatal descent.
The Russian Federation's space program has run into hard times. A series of spectacular failures has recently been capped by the malfunction of the country's much vaunted Mars-Phobos mission, GRUNT. After failing to boost from Earth orbit, the adva
The remainder of the crippled Phobos-Grunt spacecraft is set to crash to Earth on Sunday following its botched mission to Mars, space experts have said.
Late last month, Iran put on display what it insisted was a captured American stealth drone. At the time, Tehran claimed it brought down the RQ-170 with a sophisticated electronic attack.
The head of Russia’s space agency Roscosmos--you know, the one that hasn’t enjoyed a lot of success lately--isn’t sure exactly why Russia’s doomed Phobos-Grunt mission failed to fire its engines and escape Earth’s orbit on a trajectory for Mars.
A humiliating string of accidents that has beset Russia's space program over the past year, and only seems to be getting worse, may be the result of foreign sabotage, the head of the Russian Space Agency (Roskosmos), Vladimir Popovkin, hinted on Tues
If you’d like software projects that might one day send your code to Mars or on a deep space mission, NASA has some code for you to hack on. The Space Agency recently unveiled a new website, home for NASA’s various open source software projects.
Large sheets made from carbon nanotubes could lead to lighter aircraft and more resilient space probes.
Here at PopSci we don’t like to spread rumors. And that’s how I generally like to start off a post wherein I intend to propagate some kind of hearsay rooted mostly in speculation. Hearsay like this: America’s X-37B spaceplane
Next-generation Mars rovers might not need solar panels or plutonium packs for juice — they’ll bring microbes with them to use in fuel cells. The Naval Research Laboratory is working on potential fuel cell designs
Granted, it was quite a lot of money: around $2 billion. And the satellite’s loss would also set back the Pentagon’s efforts to revamp its communications infrastructure as battle becomes more bandwidth-intensive.
The twin Grail probes arrived at the moon on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, and are preparing to study our only natural satellite's past.
Scientists from Arizona State University are proposing that closely examining high resolution photographs of the moon, retrieved by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), may reveal "incontrovertible signatures of non-human technology."
The second of two NASA lunar probes on a mission to study the Moon’s inner core went into orbit as planned, the US space agency said.
Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen raised a lot of eyebrows with his plan to build the largest airplane ever, then use it to launch rockets into space. But as wild as the idea of a six-engine airplane carrying a multi-stage rocket may be, it is evolutio
Two robotic NASA probes are due to arrive at the moon this weekend to resolve a long-standing mystery of what is inside Earth's natural satellite and how it got there
"Let's take the Internet out of the control of terrestrial entities." This call to arms, issued by hacker activist Nick Farr, is the rallying cry behind a new plan to launch satellites into space to prevent Internet censorship. Farr, a spoke
China has declared its intention to land an astronaut on the moon, in the first official confirmation of its aim to go where Americans last set foot nearly 40 years ago.
Twin NASA spacecraft are set to blast into lunar orbit at the weekend on a mission to study the subterranean structure of the Moon in order to better understand the origins of planets.
Imaginative (and often brave) pioneers like Richard C. Hoagland and the late astronomer Dr. Tom Van Flandern argued for decades that the lunar surface is littered with evidence of ancient extraterrestrial artifacts and structures. For the most part t
A Russian satellite on Friday crashed into Siberia minutes after its launch due to rocket failure, the defense ministry said, in the latest humiliating setback for Russia’s embattled space programme.
A large metallic ball has fallen from the heavens and landed in a remote region of Namibia, spurring a lot of speculation about its origins and spurring local authorities to get NASA and the European Space Agency on the horn.
Budget cuts in a program to spur commercial space taxis will likely keep the United States dependent on Russia to fly astronauts to the International Space Station until 2017, NASA's head of space operations said on Thursday.
"It's absolutely astounding," says Karl Battams of the Naval Research Lab in Washington DC. "I did not think the comet's icy core was big enough to survive plunging through the several million degree solar corona for close to an hour, but Comet
"This is not a sketch," Rutan said. "It exists in hundreds of detailed drawings, and it's relatively close to [being built] as soon as we can get a building big enough." Tipping the scales at 1.2 million pounds, the mammoth aircraft will need to take
