NASA's Opportunity rover has worked flawlessly since its "hole-in-one" landing last Saturday. Today, it "stood-up", stretching its wheels from its travelling position. It could roll off the lander for the final 10 feet of its journey onto...

The Invisible Revealed

This Saturday, NASA will be launching the fourth and final telescope of the "Great Observatory Program" which began in the 70's. After the Hubble Telescope (1990), the Compton Gamma Ray Telescope (1991), and the Chandra X-ray telescope (1999),...

dot-Space

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...
There is a definate buzz in the air at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California that has been growing all weekend. We'll find out for sure what all the fuss is about now that NASA has scheduled a...

Target: Mars

And they're off! A flotilla of spacecraft is heading to Mars in a race that will be reminicent of an Independance Day scene. Mars' orbit will be swinging it within 34.6 million miles of Earth, closer than...

Close Call

On January 13, Astronomers around the world believed that a newly discovered asteroid, 30m in diameter, had a 1 in 4 chance of hitting the Earth within the following 36 hours, somewhere in the northern hemisphere. An object...
Asteroid 2003 QQ47 is about a kilometer wide and the impact on March 21, 2014 would have the effect of 20 Million Hiroshima atomic bombs. But we're not sure it will hit at all. The margin of error...

The New Space Race

Just weeks after U.S. President George W. Bush announced plans for NASA to send a person to Mars, the European Space Agency has followed suit. The ESA's program - codenamed "Aurora" - is much more detailed. The first step...

Watching the Watcher

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...
The European Space Agency opened its first Deep Space listening post in Australia this week, giving it the ability to launch and keep in contact with spacecraft beyond Jupiters orbit. Previously, the ESA has had to rely on...
Unlimited Cheese Supply China has some ambitious plans to begin a lunar program within the next 2 years. Code named Chang'e (according to legend, this fairy visits the moon), the project aims to mine rare resources found on the...

NASA is back

At 11:30, last night, "Spirit" entered the Martian Atmosphere. In the 6 minutes that followed, anxious scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory ticked off each milestone, signalled by changes in tones sent by the plummeting craft. Atmospheric drag, parachute...

Recent Posts