SPACE

How Curiosity Snapped Its Incredible Self-Portrait

Photo Courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems On October 31, the Mars Curiosity Rover indulged in a tradition honored by party people everywhere: the self-snapped photo, which the rover took in Gale Crater (Mount Sharp, Curiosity's event

Felix Baumgartner Makes Record-Breaking Jump From The Edge Of Space

Felix Baumgartner prepares to make a 96,000 foot test jump. Photo: After 5 years of preparation, a lawsuit, a 96,000-foot test jump, and wind that twice delayed his attempt, Felix Baumgartner finally made the highest and fastest jump in history yesterda

Space Madness: The Psychosis That Never Happened

From Star Trek to Ren and Stimpy to Van Der Graaf Generator’s “Pioneers Over C,” pop culture and fiction are filled with men, women, and animals who have gone excitedly beyond the bounds of the Earth ... only to lose their grips on reality and mentally br

How NASA is Preparing to Visit and/or Destroy Asteroids

So there's this asteroid, 99942 Apophis, that will make a "close approach to" (read: "near miss of") Earth in 2029 and possibly again in 2036. Don't worry, we're probably fine -- there are lots of way more dangerous asteroids coming our way...just not qu

Neil Armstrong's Giant Leap

Neil Armstrong -- astronaut, engineer, professor, Navy pilot, and first man on the moon -- has died at the age of 82. He is best known for the words he spoke just after he set foot on the moon. Contrary to popular belief, Armstrong said (emphasis added)

CURIOSITY HAS LANDED

After a tense and slightly inebriated evening of watching NASA TV, I am pleased to report: NASA's Curiosity rover has

How to Watch Tonight's "Curiosity" Rover Landing

NASA's latest and greatest Mars rover, known as Curiosity, will attempt to land on Mars early Monday morning (or late Sunday night, depending on where you are on Earth). The landing is scheduled for 05:31 (UTC), which is Monday morning at 1:31am Eastern

In Event of Moon Disaster: The White House Plan for the Worst-Case Scenario

Today is the 43rd anniversary of the lunar landing. Here's a look at the worst-case scenario plans, which Chris Higgins originally discussed in

11 Moons You Should Get to Know

You may have heard already that a fifth moon was discovered orbiting Pluto. (If not, Hubble spotted a fifth moon orbiting Pluto.) We know just enough about P5 to know that it's tiny, and it's a moon. Here are some other wild and wonderful worlds that orbi

What's Happening on Saturn's Moons?

This 25-minute film explores what we've learned about Saturn's various moons via space probes. The data comes primarily from NASA's Cassini, though some is from the Voyager and Galileo missions. Nitrogen geysers, bizarre surface ridges, and real atmosph

11 Eye-Opening NASA Wakeup Calls

NASA has been waking up astronauts using music since the Apollo Program. Sometimes those wakeup calls get pretty weird. 1. STS-111 - "I Got You Babe" from Groundhog Day On June 19, 2002, the crew of the Space Shuttle Endeavour awoke to a tinny rendit

Collision Course: A Brief Guide to Earth's Most Interesting Impact Craters

A Norwegian family arrived at their cabin to open it up for the spring and found a surprise: a large rock had smashed through the roof. It was identified as a 1.3 pound breccia meteorite. It didn't hurt anybody, and its sale price should easily cover the

The Expanding Universe: How the Universe Got Bigger As We Measured It

Since before history began, we have tried to understand our world and our place in it. To the earliest hunter-gatherer tribes, this meant little more than knowing the tribe's territory. But as people began to settle and trade, knowing the wider world beca

It Came From Space! Man-Made Objects That Crashed Back to Earth

Most orbital debris is in low Earth orbit, where "what goes up must come down" — derelict satellites, spent rocket boosters, explosive bolt shrapnel, payload fairings, interstage structures, payload adapters, spin-up counterweights, and more. Most reenter

"Cosmos" as Choose-Your-Own-Adventure

Accountant and Cosmos aficionado Callum Sutherland has remixed the landmark Carl Sagan documentary Cosmos into a "Choose-Your-Own-Adventure" style video series called Imagination. You have to have Flash installed, and YouTube Annotations enabled for it t

NOVA: The Fabric of the Cosmos

NOVA's "The Fabric of the Cosmos" premieres tonight, November 2, at 9pm ET/PT on most PBS stations. Recommended for: families who aren't quite sure what relativity is, but want to find out. Starting tonight, enjoy the four-hour series The Fabric of the

The Starship Enterprise is Made of Poplar

Last week marked the 45th anniversary of Star Trek's debut on TV. As part of the anniversary-related festivities, the Smithsonian is highlighting the original Enterprise model used on the show, which is part of the museum's permanent collection. (We're

NASA - The Frontier Is Everywhere

In December, I asked whether y'all could handle more Carl Sagan remixes. The overwhelming answer was YES, so today I bring you "NASA - The Frontier is Everywhere," a promotional social media video created for NASA, but not by NASA, featuring Carl Sagan's

9 Famous College Dropouts

Conventional wisdom tells us that a college degree will get you much further than only a high school diploma. But what about those who choose to cut out while pursuing their higher educations and go it alone, free from the constraints of academia?

Hammer and Feather Drop on the Moon

In 1971, astronaut David Scott conducted Galileo's famous hammer/feather drop experiment on the moon, during the Apollo 15 mission. Galileo had concluded that all objects, regardless of mass, fall at the same speed -- however, the resistance caused by th

Attention, People of Earth

The New Yorker brings us an important message from extraterrestrials, translated by writer Paul Simms. I'm just gonna start this dialog by emphasizing that everything's cool. They just want to, you know, check out our planet and hang out. There are som

How Interns Stole NASA's Moon Rocks

In 2002, a ragtag trio of NASA interns conspired to steal millions of dollars' worth of lunar rock samples from their secure storage vault. (Apparently they didn't have an old comic book handy -- they could have easily ordered all the Moon Rocks they wan

Recovering NASA History in an Abandoned McDonald's

In 1966, NASA's Lunar Orbiter program performed a detailed survey of the moon's surface. The Orbiters mapped the moon in exquisite detail, searching for suitable places that later missions could use as landing sites. The Orbiters sent back their data vi

The Arecibo Message

Let's say you're a human with a big radio transmitter, who wants to send a message to the putative aliens out there light-years away, listening by their radio receivers. What would your message say? How would you format it, since you don't have any conc

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