Headline Feeds|
R2 Lands Space Station Gig April 14, 2010 
Moving slowly and deliberately, a pair of white-gloved hands reach out, grasp a white cloth and carefully pull it back, revealing a manila envelope. The hands then deftly move to the envelope, pick it up and present it to onlookers. The scene is from a NASA video, and the hands belong to a character known as "R2."
|
Sun-Gazing Observatory Set for Launch February 11, 2010 
Originally planned for launch on Tuesday, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory was delayed once again on Wednesday due to high winds. The new planned launch for the device from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida is Thursday, Feb. 11; the launch window is between 10:23 a.m. and 11:23 a.m. EST.
|
|
Endeavour Lifts Off to Fit ISS With Giant Observation Deck February 08, 2010 
Following a day's delay due to cloudy weather, space shuttle Endeavour launched successfully early Monday morning from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The shuttle, which launched at 4:14 a.m. EST, is carrying a new module and an attached cupola for the International Space Station.
|
Obama Gazes Past the Moon to Mars February 03, 2010 
President Obama on Monday proposed a dramatically new path that would end NASA's Constellation moon program and shift the agency's focus to developing new technologies for deeper space exploration instead. "We were not on a path to get back to the moon's surface" in a reasonable time frame, NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden explained while presenting the proposed budget for fiscal year 2011.
|
|
NASA's WISE Surveyor Sets Out to Illuminate Secrets of the Sky December 14, 2009 
Early Monday morning, NASA launched a spacecraft that will map the entire sky in infrared light with more sensitivity and resolution than has ever been possible before.
A Delta II rocket carrying NASA's new Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California at 6:09 a.m. PST Monday and deposited the instrument into a polar orbit 326 miles above Earth.
|
Facebook's Bossy, Cagey Privacy Maneuvers December 11, 2009 
In making a move meant to enhance user privacy, Facebook went about things in a kind of intrusive way this week. As you know, the site started out as a college-kids-only social network, and the content you'd find on Facebook at that time reflected the demographic in all its boozy glory.
|
|
VSS Enterprise to Take Adventurous and Affluent on Space Jaunts December 08, 2009 
You couldn't find a more appropriate name for the world's first commercial spaceship, which Virgin Galactic officially unveiled to the world and the media Monday night at California's Mojave Air and Space Port. The SpaceShipTwo reusable suborbital plane is now the Virgin Space Ship Enterprise, and it represents a business undertaking worthy of a James T. Kirk-led mission: private spaceflight.
|
SpaceX Chalks Up Another First for Commercial Space Travel July 14, 2009 
Space Exploration Technologies -- or SpaceX, as it is usually called -- took a key step toward providing support for NASA and advancing private space travel on Monday: It successfully launched a small satellite into orbit atop its Falcon 1 rocket. It was a first for the company, which has been making significant strides in private space flight since its founding in 2002 by Elon Musk, cofounder of PayPal.
|
|
NASA Tests New Deep Space Cyber-Net November 20, 2008 
NASA has announced it has successfully tested the first deep-space communications network. The new network, modeled on the Internet, was able to transmit scores of space images between Earth and a NASA science spacecraft located more than 20 million miles away. Dubbed the "Interplanetary Internet," the software protocol was a joint venture between NASA and Vint Cerf, a vice president at Google, that began in 1998.
|
Planetary Goo and the Threat of Vegetarianism October 31, 2008 
About 30 years ago, we Earthlings sent a probe to check out Mercury, the tiny planet closest to the sun, and concluded that it was just a big hot rock. But after poking around on the moon and Mars for a few decades, we decided to take another look at Mercury.
|
|
Messenger Finds Blue Goo on Mercury October 30, 2008 
The results are in, and NASA's latest fly-by of Mercury is shedding new light on the solar system's smallest planet. The Messenger space probe zipped around Mercury early in October, examining parts of the planet never before explored. The latest mission is the second of three passes Messenger will take around the planet.
|
GeoEye Starts New Earth Photo Album With High-Res Pics October 10, 2008 
Some five weeks after its launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, GeoEye-1, the satellite developed by aerial and geospatial information provider GeoEye, has signaled back to Earth. GeoEye-1 snapped the first location the satellite saw when the camera door was opened -- Kutztown University, located midway between Reading and Allentown, Penn.
|
|
NASA Craft to Make Second, Closer Swing Past Mercury October 02, 2008 
NASA is poised to take a closer-than-ever look at the closest planet to the sun. The space agency's Messenger spacecraft will zoom over Mercury's surface in the wee hours of the morning on Monday, coming within 124 miles of the rocky ground. The move marks NASA's second scan of the surface in its first mission to Mercury in decades.
|
SpaceX Private Rocket Blazes Post-Shuttle Trail September 30, 2008 
A man who made his name by founding PayPal has now made history by launching a small, low-cost rocket into space. Elon Musk, who heads up space exploration company SpaceX, successfully sent a Falcon 1 rocket into orbit over the weekend. It marked the company's fourth attempt and first success in launching the rocket.
|
|
One Giant Leap for Malware August 28, 2008 
Call it proof that no one's above the common malware attack: NASA's own International Space Station laptops fell victim to an infection attempt, the space agency has revealed. The bug was caught and stopped before any damage was done, but the incident is raising awareness of just how easily harmful code can reach any computer -- and how important is really is to take preventative precautions before your own system is hit.
|
City-Sized Collider Set for Smashing Debut August 08, 2008 
A machine poised to make science history is now ready to launch. The Large Hadron Collider -- a giant machine built 330 feet below the France-Switzerland border -- is scheduled to fire up for the first time next month, on Sept. 10. The LHC, as its name suggests, works by smashing tiny particles called "hadrons" together at extremely high energies -- higher than has ever been possible before.
|
|
Prize Power: How Competition Inspires Tech Innovation August 06, 2008 
Bob Weiss knows a thing or two about dreams. "I grew up with the promise that if one wanted to go to space, they would get the chance," said Weiss, president of the X Prize Foundation. The trouble was that nobody kept the promise. "It became obvious that the only people that were going to space were government-trained employees called 'astronauts.' Other folks were not getting to go," Weiss said.
|
Brackish Soil Sample Suggests Martian Dirt Is Toxic August 05, 2008 
A new discovery made on Mars throws a curve ball at the question of whether life ever existed on the Red Planet. NASA's Phoenix Lander has uncovered a harshly reactive salt called "perchlorate" in soil samples taken from the ground. The finding stands in stark contrast to the original belief that Mars's soil was in many ways similar to Earth's and could support a variety of life.
|
|
Virgin Galactic's Mothership Ready to Haul Tourist Rocket to Space July 29, 2008 
Don't book that cruise just yet -- the vacation to outer space is a step closer to becoming reality. Virgin Galactic unveiled its White Knight Two carrier this week, starting the countdown to the world's first airline to take tourists to the stars. White Knight Two is set to carry passengers to near zero-gravity reaches of the skies on Virgin's SpaceShipTwo rocket.
|
Lunar Samples Reveal Watery Secret July 10, 2008 
A new analysis of some very old rocks is reshaping our understanding of the moon. Scientists used modern techniques to search for tiny traces of hydrogen in a set of lunar sand samples taken by Apollo astronauts in the '70s. The systems used in the study were able to break down the rocks 10 times more effectively than any past techniques.
|
See More Articles in Space Section >>
