Latest Space Stories
News media planning to cover the launch of NASA's Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) mission on June 26 at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California should apply for accreditation by June 18. Deployment of IRIS from the Orbital Sciences L-1011 carrier aircraft aboard a Pegasus rocket is targeted for 10:27 p.m. EDT at an altitude of 39,000 feet over the Pacific Ocean. That location is approximately 100 miles northwest of Vandenberg off the central coast of California. News media...
Impact Design Europe joins the APA, with CCC now available for download TROY, Mich., April 24, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- The Altair Partner Alliance announced today that Impact Design Europe has joined the program with its impact analysis tool, Crash Cad Calculate (CCC). CCC assists in the design and optimization of thin-walled cross sections of beams used in the creation of any crashworthy structure. CCC is applicable wherever the energy absorption of beam construction is crucial,...
[ Watch the Video: ScienceCasts: Comet ISON Meteor Shower ] Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Astronomers have been given the clearest view yet of a comet that is supposed to light up the skies later this year. Comet ISON is expected to create a spectacular show in the night sky in November, and NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has provided scientists with a great preview, months before its premier debut. Comet ISON is a "dirty snowball," meaning it is a clump of...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Asteroids and other objects in our solar system collide often, but researchers are not always able to detect or track such impacts from Earth. This means that we are sometimes caught unaware by the "rogue debris" created by the impacts. New research from the University of California, Los Angeles, has devised a method to monitor these types of collisions in interplanetary space. The team used a new method to determine the mass of...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online The European Space Agency (ESA) says it has unraveled the mystery as to the origin of water observed in the upper atmosphere of Jupiter. ESA's Herschel space observatory found evidence that the water in this part of Jupiter's atmosphere was delivered by the dramatic impact of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 in July 1994. During this collision, a string of 21 comet fragments pounded into the southern hemisphere of Jupiter, leaving dark scars...
redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online A SETI Institute scientist has been chosen to lead the design, development and operations of the data processing center for NASA’s next-generation successor to the Kepler Mission, the Mountain View, California-based organization announced on Friday. Jon M. Jenkins, a senior researcher at the Carl Sagan Center of the SETI Institute, will oversee operations of the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) Mission’s Data...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online We all feel the pain of what has taken place in Boston and Texas this week, and for some we need to find a little bit of joy to help get out of the funk these disasters have caused. Fortunately, Earth Day is right around the corner, and it can allow us to help find a little peace from such an unpleasant week. Events such as the Boston Marathon bombings can unify the people impacted, as well as any resident of this planet who has even...
[WATCH VIDEO: Comet ISON Meteor Shower] redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online While Comet ISON’s eagerly anticipated encounter with the sun won’t even happen until November, it seems likely the fireball is already prepping a special encore performance for stargazers here on Earth. In January, the US space agency’s Swift spacecraft observed the comet ISON while it was still near the orbit of Jupiter. Even then, it had already become extremely active, with...
VIDEO: [Zooming Into The Horsehead Nebula] | VIDEO: [The Gaseous Landscape Of The Horsehead Nebula] Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online The Hubble Space Telescope is celebrating its 23rd year in orbit, and to commemorate the veteran observatory, NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) have released an amazing image of the Horsehead Nebula. For 23 years, the Hubble Space Telescope has been making cutting-edge observations of several of the sky's best objects....
At a major planetary defense conference in Flagstaff, AZ, last evening, the Planetary Society announced the winners of its 2013 Shoemaker Near Earth Object (NEO) grants and was recognized itself for the Society’s long history of international leadership in the detection and mitigation of threatening asteroids, and other planetary discoveries. “As the Chelyabinsk impact demonstrated, asteroid impacts happen; they are dangerous, destructive, with no regard for human life,” said Bill...
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...
