Jeff Hoffman has floated in the vacuum of space. He’s looked down at our planet from above, seen the whorls of clouds, the vast oceans, and the crowded cities as webs of light. Over five missions — including the first to the Hubble Space Telescope — Hoffman has spent 1,211 hours of his life in […]

BAIKONUR – 2 astronauts, a cosmonaut and a ball set to be utilized in the upcoming football World Cup in Russia launched Wednesday for a two-day flight to the International Spaceport Station. Nasa’s Drew Feustel and Richard Arnold took off from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan for a five-month objective in a Soyuz MS-08 under […]

The elaborate horns and frills were more likely for attracting mates than fighting off enemies For many people, thoughts of Triceratops conjure up a massive dino sporting sweeping horns that can drive deep into the belly of its mortal enemy, Tyrannosaurus. But scientists have no real evidence the two Cretaceous beasts ever tangled. And as Mary Halton at the BBC reports, a new […]

As SpaceX ramps up rocket production and rehabilitation, it’s going to need new facilities. That can be tricky for any company, but it’s a particularly difficult problem when you need to build enormous rockets suitable for interplanetary missions with large payload fairings like SpaceX’s upcoming BFR (Big Falcon Rocket). SpaceX appears to have chosen Los […]

New calculations made by Aerospace Corporation and the European Space Agency (ESA) indicate that China’s disabled Tiangong-1 space laboratory – could be coming back to Earth – soon. Estimates by the two organizations suggest that the space station could crash into Earth between March 28 and April 11. Beijing lost control over Tiangong-1 on March […]

The Juno spacecraft has found that the giant planet Jupiter is full of big surprises; its interior composition and structure seem to be quite different, and its winds even more active, than originally thought. Now, giant cyclones at the planet’s poles have been seen in greater detail than ever before. They are not only stunning, […]

Even though it may feel like it’s oh so far away, especially if you’re living in the northeast, spring will be here before you know it. And “officially” the first day of spring this year is March 20. Whether your particular place of residence’s weather decides to cooperate is iffy, it’s “scheduled” all the same. […]

If ever a human being seemed capable of living forever, that human was Stephen Hawking. In 1963, when Hawking was twenty-one, he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the degenerative neurological disorder, and given three years to live; he died this past Wednesday, at the age of seventy-six. For five decades, he used an electric wheelchair and, […]

It started as a loose collection of sky watchers, who braved the cold on countless nights to catch the shimmering colors of the aurora borealis dancing above them. It developed into a friendly argument between amateurs and experts, which erupted over beers one evening at a pub in Calgary, Canada. And it ended this week, […]

On Monday, NASA announced a category G1 geomagnetic storm would hit earth sometime between March 14 and 15. While the idea of a massive solar storm hurtling toward Earth at thousands of miles per second sounds scary, there’s really no need to worry. In fact, all you need to be concerned about is if you’ll be in […]