Voyager after being captured by a machine intelligence and greatly enhanced in Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
After an epic journey by any standard, Voyager 1 is leaving the solar system, forever. And we stand, collectively, on the cusp of being just barely an interstellar species: [Read more…]
We’ve talked a little bit about planetary migration and how it might happen. For some reason, a good chunk of distant solar systems feature hot Jupiter’s, large enough that they may have formed in the frost belt, orbiting crazy close to their primary star. Tidal deceleration, interaction and collision with other planets or smaller objects, detection bias? A new system worlds that could collide may offer clues: [Read more…]
You didn’t know we had a secret space shuttle? I thought everyone knew! Well, this one is pretty small, and it’s unmanned. Which helps explain why it spent over a year in orbit: [Read more…]
The online Slooh observatory will be tracking a near earth asteroid big enough to cause global fall out this evening, and you can watch it live! [Read more…]
SpaceX cleaned up on public relations last month with the successful launch of their Falcon 9 booster and Dragon spacecraft. But if everything goes right, another new space firm, Orbital Sciences, will be launching a Pegasus rocket from its signature flying launch pad today or morrow. On board, NASA’s NuStar high energy observatory: [Read more…]
Well, this is bizarre. It seems the boys in black developed two Hubble sized telescopes for spying on earth’s surface, but the devices were never deployed and are now out of date … or something. So they’ve been turned over to NASA: [Read more…]
I laughed when I saw this cartoon by Tom Tomorrow. But it turns out Drony has some brothers and sisters who aren’t quite as threatening: [Read more…]
Mars is a long ways away, and this is probably premature to say the least, but groups willing to colonise the Red Planet are already forming, some more credible than others: [Read more…]
SpaceX has teamed up with space station developer Bigelow Aerospace to dramatically lower the cost of reaching and living in space. No aerospace company would turn down money from zillionaires looking for out-of-this-world adventure, but the bread and butter of this business would probably come from other sources: [Read more…]
The Helix nebula as seen by NASA's Spitzer Telescope. Click image for top ten Spitzer images at Nat'l Geo
NASA has released the top ten images taken by the Spitzer telescope, and the same instrument has observed light across 41 light-years from a exo-planetary super-earth for the first time: [Read more…]