Professor Peter Schultz, an expert in extraterrestrial impacts from Brown University, has come to interesting conclusions that could upend the conventional wisdom about the size and type of meteorites that can strike Earth. His recent findings regarding the meteorite that ...
The Sky is Falling or Much Ado About Nothing
On March 24th the World Wide Web was flooded with a photograph of a large spherical object, which reportedly had fallen from the sky, landing in a farming area in central Brazil. The story was first published by Daniel Drehmer, ...
Magnetic Neutron Star
Observations from NASA’s Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) have revealed an important clue regarding the life cycle of neutron stars. The youngest known pulsing neutron star, PSR J1846-0258, located in the constellation Aquila, has been observed to produce magnetar-like X-ray ...
U.S. Successfully Destroys Satellite
“At 10:26 p.m. EST today, a U.S. Navy AEGIS warship, the USS Lake Erie, fired a single modified tactical Standard Missile-3, hitting the satellite approximately 247 kilometers (133 nautical miles) over the Pacific Ocean as it traveled in space at ...
Lemur – Pet Robot Assisting In Space
JPL Robotics’ Lemur (Limbed Excursion Mechanical Utility Robots) were designed to address maintenance issues on spacecrafts and space stations. The robot, named after the monkey-like animals, is equipped with a stereo camera set, allowing omni-directional vision. Lemur provides a basis ...
STS-122 Atlantis Mission Takes Off
At approximately 2:47 p.m. EST the space shuttle “Atlantis” successfully lifted off the ground from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. About two months after the shuttle’s original launch date, after which liftoff was delayed a number of times, NASA ...
‘Space Ship Two’ Unveiled
Virgin Galactic, a company owned and established by Richard Branson’s Virgin Group in order to create the world’s first commercial spaceline, has unveiled the designs of the Space Ship Two and White Knight Two carrier aircrafts. Space Ship Two is ...
2007 In Science, Medicine and Space
12 months have gone by, and TFOT continues the tradition of presenting its readers with a summary of the passing year’s most remarkable discoveries, innovations, research, and applications in science, medicine, and space exploration. The Mini-Mag Orion interstellar concept (Credit: ...
Asteroid to Hit Mars?
This past November, the NASA-funded Catalina Sky Survey near Tucson, Arizona discovered an asteroid receding from the Earth, heading towards Mars with. Astronomers estimate there is a one in 25 (four percent) chance of that this asteroid will directly hit ...
Spacesuits for You and Me
“Orbital Outfitters”, a California and Washington D.C. based start-up company, has demonstrated the first space suit designed for private space travelers. The spacesuit prototype was presented at this year’s X-Prize Cup, an annual air & Space exposition founded in order ...