Scientists at the National Aeronautic and Space Administration are working on the creation of a new spacecraft that will not only be more maneuverable than previous vessels, but will also be able to fire a retrievable harpoon.
How much damage can one man cause the National Aeronautics and Space Administration? If the Romanian Directorate for Investigating Organized Crime and Terrorism’s charges against the newly arrested Robert Butyka are to be believed, the answer to that is “somewhere over half a million dollars’ worth.”
There’s a nearly 6-ton big-as-a-bus and pretty much dead climate satellite—the largest in three decades—about to smack uncontrolled into planet Earth. There’s also a chance, albeit a ridiculously small one, that someone could get hit by one of its several dozens pieces made up of titanium, aluminum, steel and beryllium—the biggest weighs close to 300 [...]
Want to see what a major hurricane looks like chewing through a nation of 29 islands, 661 cays, and 2,387 islets? NASA’s TRMM satellite has the goods, displaying Hurricane Irene—white tendrils of tropical fury stretching hundreds of miles north and south of the island chain—as it whips over Crooked Island in the Bahamas.
In an attempt to further tighten the national belt, the U.S. House moved this week to cut the James Webb Space Telescope from the budget, effectively threatening NASA’s follow-up to the Hubble, and the future of our eyes-in-space program. There’s something poetic (poetically dismaying, that is) about the timing, too: Space shuttle Atlantis launched just [...]
Could the final launch of a space shuttle be derailed by rain and thunderstorms? It’s looking like it.
When it comes to interstellar smackdowns, I’d generally say bet on stars. But when it comes to stars versus black holes, you’ll probably want to bet on the infinitely dense singularity from which nothing—not even light—can escape.
NASA’s Mercury-bound Messenger spacecraft dropped into orbit around the tiny, orbitally eccentric planet just a few months ago, and it’s already sent back enough data to notably alter our take on the first rock from the sun.
Occasionally supermassive and always super-ominous, light-devouring black holes may be the most spectacular byproduct of our Newtonian universe, and now we know a little more about how long they’ve been out there and what they’re up to, thanks to NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.
This big asteroid, called Vesta, doesn’t look THAT scary. Then again, it’s 300,000 miles away from the camera. I’m sure it’d look a whole lot scarier from, say, 30,000 miles away. And 3,000 miles away? No thanks.
It’s another startling picture of our very own Sun that might pass for a CGI still from a summer disaster flick. You know, right before our backyard star reaches across the void with fingers of fire and gobbles us up. But don’t worry, it’ll only strike us a “glancing blow,” says NASA.
