NASA planned outpost illustration (Credit: NASA and John Frassanito & Associates) NASA is said to be looking into creating an outpost in space close to the far side of the moon. NASA officials explained that the base could serve as ...
NASA Next Gen Spacecraft Unveiled
On October 11, 2010 President Barack Obama canceled NASA’s Constellation Program. The program aim was to develop the means to carry astronauts to the International Space Station and later to the Moon, and Mars. Five months after it was canceled. ...
New Type of Moon Rocks Discovered
Scientists at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, have discovered a new type of moon rock thanks to the Moon Mineralogy Mapper instrument aboard the Indian Space Agency’s Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft. The imaging spectrometer took the first high resolution pictures of ...
Herschel Crater on Mimas of Saturn
Mimas, one of the smaller round moons of Saturn, sports Herschel crater, one of the larger impact craters in the entire Solar System. The robotic Cassini spacecraft now orbiting Saturn took the above image of Herschel crater in unprecedented detail ...
SARA Orbiter Advances
Scientists using the European Space Agency’s Sub-keV Atom Reflecting Analyzer (SARA) instrument aboard India’s Chandrayaan-1 Lunar Orbiter have determined how water could be created on the lunar surface. In addition, the same discovery could lead to an entirely new mechanism ...
Avatar’s Moon Pandora Could Be Real
NASA’s Kepler mission has excited the imagination of many astronomers, when it showed recently the potential to detect Earth-sized objects and habitable moons. In a new paper, researcher from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics suggests that stellar objects could have ...
How Saturn’s Moon Got Its Stripes
Researchers from the University of Melbourne have revealed the origins of tiger stripes and a subsurface ocean on Enceladus, one of Saturn’s many moons. In addition to explaining these geological features, the study sheds light on the evolution of planets ...
New Method for Discovering Extrasolar Planets
Researchers at the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias in Tenerife have captured spectroscopic information from light passing through the Earth’s atmosphere during a lunar eclipse that could greatly enhance our ability to discover extrasolar planets. This so-called “transmission spectrum analysis” ...
Little House on the Moon
Researchers from Malardalens University in Sweden and artist Mikael Genberg have collaborated to develop a robot that can build houses on the moon. The project, aptly named “The House on the Moon,” intends to construct a miniature red cottage on ...
Ares Super-Chute Tests
NASA and the United States Air Force have successfully tested a new super-chute system aimed at reclaiming reusable Ares booster rockets. On February 28, 2009 a 50,000 pound dummy rocket booster was dropped in the Arizona desert and stopped by ...