Space Exploration News – Latest Headlines

NASA, Lockheed Martin announce Exploration Design Challenge for students

NASA and Lockheed Martin Corp. of Bethesda, Md., will involve students in the flight test of NASA's Orion spacecraft through an Exploration Design Challenge to be unveiled in Houston on Monday, March 11.

March 7, 2013 Read more

Engineers developing new ideas to save the Earth from asteroids

Iowa State's Bong Wie is leading a team that's developing a system to protect the planet from asteroids. The work has attracted $600,000 in NASA support.

March 7, 2013 Read more

Distance to nearest galaxy measured

A team of astronomers have managed to improve the measurement of the distance to our nearest neighbor galaxy and, in the process, refine an astronomical calculation that helps measure the expansion of the universe.

March 6, 2013 Read more

Curtains down for the black hole firewall paradox: making gravity safe for Einstein again

Research by scientists at the University of York has revealed new insights into the life and death of black holes.

March 6, 2013 Read more

New evidence that comets could have seeded life on Earth

I's among the most ancient of questions: What are the origins of life on Earth? A new experiment simulating conditions in deep space reveals that the complex building blocks of life could have been created on icy interplanetary dust and then carried to Earth, jump-starting life.

March 5, 2013 Read more

NASA launches interactive website to design interplanetary missions

A small group of engineers at NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., have launched a new web-based tool for scientists and engineers to use when designing spacecraft trajectories to interplanetary destinations.

March 5, 2013 Read more

Gravitational telescope creates space invader mirage

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope is one of the most powerful available to astronomers, but sometimes it too needs a helping hand. This comes in the form of Einstein's general theory of relativity, which makes galaxy clusters act as natural lenses, amplifying the light coming from very distant galaxies.

March 5, 2013 Read more

Announcing the Third International Lunar Superconductor Applications Workshop

Flexure Engineering has invited specialists from around the world in fields of cold temperature electronics, DeepCrypo Engineering, Lunar science, and space entrepreneurship to take part in the Third Annual International Lunar Superconductor Applications Workshop.

March 5, 2013 Read more

Cutting through the spin on supermassive black holes

Astronomers have measured the spin of a black hole buried in the heart of a galaxy located 56 million light years away, and discovered it was spinning quickly - about as quickly as it could go.

March 4, 2013 Read more

Goddard lab works at extreme edge of cosmic ice

Behind locked doors, in a lab built like a bomb shelter, Perry Gerakines makes something ordinary yet truly alien: ice.

March 4, 2013 Read more

CSI: Milky Way

There is growing evidence that several million years ago the center of the Milky Way galaxy was site of all manner of celestial fireworks and a pair of astronomers from Vanderbilt and Georgia Institute of Technology propose that a single event - a black hole collision - can explain all the "forensic" clues.

March 1, 2013 Read more

Van Allen Probes reveal a new radiation belt around Earth

NASA's Van Allen Probes mission has discovered a previously unknown third radiation belt around Earth, revealing the existence of unexpected structures and processes within these hazardous regions of space.

February 28, 2013 Read more

Young protoplanet discovered?

Exoplanet researchers and cosmologists from ETH Zurich have discovered an object that could be a planet in the making. It would be the first time that scientists have succeeded in observing this process.

February 28, 2013 Read more

Discoveries suggest icy cosmic start for amino acids and DNA ingredients (w/video)

Using new technology at the telescope and in laboratories, researchers have discovered an important pair of prebiotic molecules in interstellar space. The discoveries indicate that some basic chemicals that are key steps on the way to life may have formed on dusty ice grains floating between the stars.

February 28, 2013 Read more

Space telescope Fermi's motion produces a study in spirograph (w/video)

NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope orbits our planet every 95 minutes, building up increasingly deeper views of the universe with every circuit. Now a Fermi scientist has transformed LAT data of a famous pulsar into a mesmerizing movie that visually encapsulates the spacecraft's complex motion.

February 28, 2013 Read more

X-ray space observatory NuSTAR helps solve riddle of black hole spin

Two X-ray space observatories, NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton, have teamed up to measure definitively, for the first time, the spin rate of a black hole with a mass 2 million times that of our sun.

February 27, 2013 Read more

White dwarf supernovae are discovered in Virgo Cluster galaxy and in sky area 'anonymous' (w/video)

Observation of two bright exploding stars improves the astronomical "tape measure" that scientists use to calculate the acceleration of the expansion of the universe.

February 27, 2013 Read more

JUICE - mission to the icy moons of Jupiter

ESA chooses instruments for its Jupiter icy moons explorer.

February 27, 2013 Read more