NASA Is Readying IRIS Spacecraft For Launch In June

Pulsars have a number of unusual qualities. Like zombies, they shine even though they’re technically dead, and they rotate rapidly, emitting powerful and regular beams of radiation that are seen as flashes of light, blinking on and off at intervals from seconds to milliseconds. A NASA team has built a first-of-a-kind testbed that simulates these distinctive pulsations.

In what can only be considered a sign of the times, NASA has announced that it will begin accepting bids to rent or buy its Launch Pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center from a “commercial company or consortium.”

A little more than three months ago NASA’s Curiosity rover drilled into the Martian surface for the first time, collecting a sample from a rock called “John Klein.” On Sunday, Curiosity was at it again, this time drilling into the “Cumberland” rock.

The Slooh Space Camera is planning to broadcast the fiery asteroid explosion that took place on the moon just a few months ago.

ESA’s Director General, Jean-Jacques Dordain, announced today that the ISS Multilateral Crew Operations Panel has decided on Friday, 17 May to accept his proposal to fly astronaut Timothy Peake to the International Space Station in 2015.

An ESA business incubation start-up company is helping major car manufacturers to develop electric vehicle concepts and improve safety systems by turning ideas quickly into virtual prototypes.

Our knowledge of how stars evolve arises out of our survey of billions of stars within and outside of our galaxy. As we piece together the snapshots of these stars of various sizes and masses, at various stages of their evolution, we begin to get a complete picture of how stars are born, live, and die.

A Russian capsule carrying animals and biological experiments successfully returned to Earth on Sunday after spending nearly a month in space, various media outlets have reported.

Johnny Cash may have preferred this galaxy's burning ring of fire to the one he sang about falling into in his popular song. The "starburst ring" seen at center in red and yellow hues is not the product of love, as in the song, but is instead a frenetic region of star formation.

On May 17, the sun unleashed an Earth-directed coronal mass ejection (CME) at 5:24 a.m. EDT sending billions of tons of solar particles into space. The matter from this CME will likely reach Earth in one to three days and potentially affect electronic systems in satellites and on the ground.

NASA will be celebrating the life of the famous female astronaut Sally Ride on Monday in Washington DC at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

Exchange of electromagnetic energy is fairly well understood. The force carrier, the photon, is readily detectable and manipulated, making the physics of electromagnetic radiation easy to study.

The potential of a human mission to Mars has captured the imagination of many recently. However, before astronauts set foot on the Red Planet, NASA first plans to visit Near-Earth asteroids and potentially to the moons of Mars.

NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has discovered a pale rock that has a higher composition of aluminum and silica and a lower concentration of calcium and iron than any other rock it has examined during its time on Mars, the US space agency announced on Friday.

If you take a good look at the Moon it isn’t too difficult to paint a pretty clear picture of the lunar surface’s violent past. Our neighboring natural satellite is pock-marked with thousands upon thousands of craters from meteors and asteroids that have been pelting its surface for more than a billion years.

NASA confirmed on Thursday that the ammonia leak its astronauts fixed on the International Space Station last week is officially plugged up.

It took nine years, but NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has finally surpassed a record set by Apollo 17 astronauts over 40 years ago.

ESA’s Proba-V, a next-generation earth watcher designed to image the planet’s vegetation, is now showing signs of life. More than a week after being set into a polar orbit roughly 510 miles over Earth, the mini satellite was switched on just in time to grab an image of the land cover over western France.

Predicting the weather is difficult. With varying pressures, the Earth’s rotation, and various other factors, weather systems border on chaos. But, believe it or not, predicting the weather on Earth is rather straightforward compared to predicting the atmospheric motions of the gas giants that lay beyond the asteroid belt.

NASA said it is moving forward with its plan to send a spacecraft to an asteroid to bring back a sample to Earth. It will begin preparations for a launch in 2016, with a rendezvous with asteroid Bennu in 2018.