Latest Space Stories
WASHINGTON, April 12, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Two members of the Expedition 35 crew will venture outside the International Space Station April 19 for a six-hour spacewalk to deploy and retrieve several science experiments and install a new navigational aid. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) NASA Television will broadcast the spacewalk live beginning at 9:30 a.m. EDT. Russian flight engineers Pavel Vinogradov and Roman Romanenko will open the hatch...
John P. Millis, Ph.D. for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online It seemed that that we had everything worked out. Astronomers modeled the creation and evolution as the collapse of a giant solar nebula. As the central star formed, the radiation then influenced the formation of the planets – rocky planets dominating the inner sanctum, while the larger gas giants naturally populated the orbits further out. All of this was then encased in a spherical swarm of icy bodies known as comets....
Subaru Telescope A duo of astronomers, Dr. Youichi Ohyama (Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Academia Sinica or ASIAA, Taiwan) and Dr. Ananda Hota (UM-DAE Centre for Excellence in the Basic Sciences or CBS, India), has discovered a Blue Supergiant star located far beyond our Milky Way Galaxy in the constellation Virgo. Over fifty-five million years ago, it emerged in an extremely wild environment, surrounded by intensely hot plasma (a million degrees centigrade) and amidst raging...
University of Arizona Scientists at the University of Arizona welcome President Barack Obama's NASA budget proposal, rolled out today, and specifically its focus on gaining a better understanding of asteroids that could potentially harm Earth. The UA has a unique depth of capabilities and expertise that can help inform such missions and ensure their success. The UA is operating the most prolific ground-based system for identifying near-Earth asteroids, and it is tasked by NASA with...
[ Watch the Video: The Sounds of the Big Bang in High Fidelity ] April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online "If the Universe started with a bang, and no one was alive yet to observe it, would it still make a sound?" It sounds like the start of a really cliché joke, but the answer, surprisingly, is yes. Scientists believe the expanding early Universe produced waves of sound that echoed through the dense plasma and hydrogen that filled it at the time. Obviously, these...
[ Watch the Video: Zooming In On The Planetary Nebula IC 1295 ] Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A new image released by the European Space Observatory (ESO) shows the glowing green planetary nebula IC 1295. The new pictures taken by the Very Large Telescope (VLT) shows the nebula surrounding a dim and dying star located about 3300 light-years away in the constellation of Scutum (The Shield). "It has the unusual feature of being surrounded by multiple shells...
HubbleSite NASA and the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) have announced the selection of 17 new Hubble Fellows. STScI in Baltimore, Md., administers the Hubble Fellowship Program for NASA. The Hubble Fellowship Program now includes all research relevant to present and future missions in NASA's Cosmic Origins theme. These missions currently include the Herschel Space Observatory, the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the Stratospheric...
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory NASA has selected five planet hunters to receive the 2013 Carl Sagan Exoplanet Postdoctoral Fellowships. The fellowship, named for the late astronomer, was created to inspire the next generation of explorers seeking to learn more about planets, and possibly life, around other stars. The primary goal of the fellowship program is to support outstanding recent postdoctoral scientists in conducting independent research related to the science goals of NASA's...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online The European Space Agency's (ESA) Herschel space observatory has snapped images of a dust belt orbiting a subgiant star that hosts a planetary system. The space observatory's sensitive far-infrared detection helped astronomers resolve bright emission around Kappa Coronae Borealis, indicating the presence of a dusty debris disc. The star is a little heavier than our own Sun at 1.5 solar masses, is around 2.5 billion years old, and sits...
Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Using observations made from the Suzaku satellite, a joint venture between Japan's space agency and NASA, an international team of researchers has found that the star responsible for Johannes Kepler’s famous supernova contained a much higher heavy metal content that our own sun. After determining the makeup of the distant star, the scientists said they have a greater understanding of Ia supernovae, a useful class of stellar...
Latest Space Reference Libraries
The prominent feature that allows for the existence of life on Earth is the Sun. Radiation from our closest star provides heat and energy to our planet, driving biological processes and providing the necessary conditions for liquid water to naturally exist. But our Sun is only but one star in this vast Universe. And as it turns out, most stars are quite different than the one that illuminates our day. For this reason, scientists have, for hundreds of years, attempted to study the other...
Image Caption: Artistic concept of a planetary system. Credit: Wikipedia/NASA/JPL-Caltech The term Astronomy encompasses a broad range of topics, including the study of stars, galaxies, and planets. In order to focus on the different areas of study, many subfields of astronomy emerge. One such area is the study of planets known, appropriately, as Planetary Astronomy. Observational Planetary Astronomy Even within the field of Planetary Astronomy, there are several divisions to...
Ad Astra is a quarterly-published journal of the National Space Society (NSS). The name “ad astra” means “to the stars.” The journal was established following the merger of the L5 Society and the National Space Institute, which formed the NSS in 1987. The NSS is a non-profit aerospace advocacy and educational institution based in Washington DC. On November 28, 2007, the NSS announced MM Publishing Inc. as the newest publisher of Ad Astra. MM Publishing officially took on the role...
Columbia launched from Kennedy Space Center on October 22, 1992 at 1:09 PM EDT and landed at Kennedy on November 1 at 9:05 AM EST. The shuttle orbited 159 times at an altitude of 163 nautical miles at an inclination of 28.45 degrees and travelled 4.1 million miles. The mission lasted 9 days, 20 hours, 56 minutes, and 13 seconds. The mission launched several satellites for international partners. The primary mission objectives were the deployment of the Laser Geodynamic Satellite II...
Columbia launched from Kennedy Space Center on June 25,1992 at 12:23 PM EDT and landed at Kennedy on July 9 at 7:42 AM EDT. The shuttle orbited 221 times at an altitude of 160 nautical miles at an inclination of 28.45 degrees and travelled 5.8 million miles. The mission lasted 13 days, 19 hours, 30 minutes, and 4 seconds. This was the longest mission to date, close to 14 days. The mission's primary purpose was to study the effects of microgravity on humans. The primary payload was the...
