NASA Wants Your Help Figuring Out How to Build Space Habitats
Answers on a postcard, please.
Answers on a postcard, please.
While it looks like it could be a car engine, in this image Scott Kelly and Terry Virts performs maintenance on the Carbon Dioxide Removal Assembly that sits in the Japanese Experiment Module. It’s a pretty important piece of kit: it scrubs the air aboard the station to remove the carbon dioxide, allowing those aboard to breathe in safety. No pressure, boys. [NASA]
For the first time, they’re actually telling us what the space plane will be doing—well, some of it anyway.
A NASA engineer explains the human limits of space.
NASA’s New Horizons probe captures the first ever family portrait of Pluto and all its little moons.
The icy white surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa is streaked in yellow-brown, cracks made by the ocean below. These dark streaks hint at the chemical composition of the ocean, which is one of the top places to search for alien life. Here’s encouraging news: The dark colour may come from sea salt — as in, the same stuff in our oceans. Read more >>
When NASA’s Orion crew module re-entered Earth’s atmosphere in 2014 tests, it did so covered in 180 small squares of an advanced heat-shielding material called Avcoat. Now, NASA’s research scientists are inspecting them to find out how they worked. Yes, that does appear to be a vacuum cleaner. Read more >>
This is a false-colour image of Europa, Jupiter’s fourth-largest moon, a water-covered giant with the smoothest surface in the Solar System. And yet, I could still swear I’m looking at the end result of a football going through a stained-glass window. Read more >>
This beautiful map shows an average of all of the available cloud observations acquired between July 2002 and April 2015 from the Aqua satellite. The shades of blue represent the cloudiness of our planet. Read More >>
It’s been nearly 30 years since Sagan’s solar sail vision, and now his spacecraft, called LightSail, is finally getting a test flight.
Dry ice is the perfect choice when you have to clean your space mirror. I’m not exaggerating when I say this is the coolest way to dust off any surface without scratching it. Read More >>
NASA has announced it wants you to send in tips and wisdom nuggets that might improve its manned mission to Mars. And you could win a few thousand quid while doing it.
A radar unit designed to detect life on exo-planets had a field test a little bit closer to home.
Sometimes a mission’s entire point is to smash one thing into a bigger thing and watch the explosion.
NASA Chief says 'we're on pace to send American astronauts to Mars in the 2030s'.
Last week, the Sun spat out a massive solar filament that extended the star’s visible hemisphere by almost half. This image of that huge lick of plasma was captured by NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO). Read more >>
