For years, we have looked up into the sky; at the moon, the sun, the stars and the other planets. Now we have for the first time pictures of what Earth looks like from Mars. NASA’s Mars Global Surveryor spacecraft orbiting Mars snapped a few shots of home last week. From a distance of 86 Read More
Okay, I wouldn’t recommend seeing “The Core”, especially if you are looking for any scientific value, but the idea of exploring the interior of the Earth is quite compelling. David Stevenson proposes sending a probe the size of a Grapefruit into a self-propogating crack in the rock. While currently infeasible, he raises the important question Read More
The Planet Mercury will travel between Earth and the Sun tomorrow morning providing a rare mini-eclipse between 3:50am ET and 9:17am ET on Wednesday Morning. Mercury will appear as a small dark spot travelling across the Sun with a diameter about 1/160th of the Sun. Of course, you shouldn’t go outside and stare at the Read More
Scientists in Earthquake-prone California are working on a series of sensors that can detect an earthquake and give a warning a few seconds before an earthquake hits. This would give enough time to get children under their desks, or set off automatic shut-offs for gas pipelines. An earthquake sends out two waves of energy. The Read More
One more of the gyroscopes used to steer the Hubble Space Telescope failed this week, sparking concern about the ongoing safety of the telescope. The telescope needs three gyroscopes to operate smoothly, and has six on board. in 1999, after four gyroscopes had failed, a shuttle service mission was brought forward and all six were Read More
So what do you do once you have made billions in the dot-com business? The common answer seems to be to leave earth behind. Jeff Bezos (Amazon.com), Elon Musk (Paypal.com), John Carmack (coder of Doom and Quake) and Paul Allen (Microsoft co-founder) are each trying to build their own spacecraft to create a private space Read More
Scaled Composites has announced that they have been working on a project to launch the first non-government space-plane for the last two years. They demonstrated part of it in the Mojave Desert today. It is a two-part plane. A launch vehicle called the White Knight takes off like an airplane, with the actual spacecraft called Read More
A team of astronomers have been busy discovering moons this week, adding one more moon to Saturn, and six new moons to Jupiter. These add to the other 12 moons of Jupiter already discovered this year, bringing the moon count for Jupiter to 58 and Saturn to 31. The flurry of moon discoveries is being Read More
Russia used a Progress M-47 supply ship to raise the orbit of the International Space Station to make its orbit about 5km longer. Since the US has suspended Shuttle flights after the Columbia break-up, this new orbit will make it easier for the Russian Soyuz spacecraft to dock with the station.
Dutch scientists are experimenting with using simple water to cool the underside of spacecraft during re-entry. By placing a container of water in the nose of the craft, the water would have to boil off completely before the temperature around it can rise above the boiling point. The major downside is that the water to Read More
The much anticipated return of Seti@Home researchers to the Arecibo Observartory in Puerto Rico has been delayed by two solar flares last week. The researchers were returning to the Observatory to examine in detail the 150 most promising signals found through it’s Seti@Home Distributed Computing project. The rare solar flares erupted from the sun early Read More
Seti@Home, widely considered to be the most successful distributed computing project yet, is taking its results to the next step. After over a million years of shared computing power through its Seti@Home screensaver, the Seti@Home team is returning to the Aricebo telescope to take a closer look at a shortlist of the 150 most promising Read More