Space & Spaceflight

If You Threw Cookie Dough at the Sun, How Long Would It Take to Bake?

First, let’s assume you are in orbit around the Earth’s atmosphere, and you threw the cookie sunward at 25 mph. The most delicious of speeds. We can approach this problem by first asking a more general question: What is the temperature vs. time for a lump of cookie dough in orbit around the sun? Then…

Kepler Just Found the Most Earth-Like Exoplanets Ever Discovered

Kepler just can’t stop discovering exoplanets. Nearly two years after scientists said it was crippled, the planet-hunting telescope recently identified eight new planets. But that’s not all. They’re all in the Goldilocks zone of their respective stars, and two of them are more Earth-like than anything astronomers have ever seen. This is exciting. If you’ve…

The ISS Is About to Get a Shipment of Laser CATS

It may not leave a trail of destruction and pew-pews in its wake but NASA’s newest atmospheric sensor, the laser-beaming CATS module, could afford researchers a fuller understanding of how our reliance on nonrenewable energy fuels climate change. Built by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, the Cloud-Aerosol Transport System (CATS) is a…

Watch SpaceX Try and Land a Rocket on a Drone Barge (Update: Aborted)

Last month, SpaceX announced that it was going to try and land its Falcon 9 spacecraft on this drone barge. Today, that moment has arrived—and you can watch the attempt right here. If you think the challenge SpaceX has set itself sounds difficult, you’d be right! Indeed, the landing spot—referred to as the autonomous spaceport…

Hubble Took an Even Better Version of One of Its Best Photos Ever

Back in 1995, the Hubble telescope took an absolutely breathtaking photo of stars being formed that’s now known as “Pillars of Creation.” And now, 20 years later, NASA has released a couple new images of the same star formation that was taken by a new and improved Hubble last year. It’s beyond breathtaking. It’s bonkers.…

What Would Happen If the Earth Stopped Its Orbit? (Nothing Good)

Welcome to Reading List. Another year and another week means another roundup of great stories that might have squeaked by during the holiday. We’ve got some speculative doom and gloom, a look into the future of one of NASA’s Mars rovers, and a profile of a man who is clickbait personified. Happy New Year and…

Watch The Space Station Go Flying Past The Moon

Thanks to the internet (and just a tiny little bit of math), Israeli photographer Gadi Eidelheit managed to get himself in position to see something quite unique: the International Space Station flying in front of the moon. Even better, he caught the whole thing on video. In order to capture the video, Eidelheit used HeavensAbove,…

All The Shit We Haven’t Actually Found on Mars

For as long as we’ve been snapping pics on the surface of Mars, we’ve been claiming to see anything and everything in its dusty, red terrain. Look at that blur; is that the silhouette of a lady Martian? A rogue military helmet from World War I? An actual human finger? Nope! It’s a rock. It’s…

Over-Hyped, Misunderstood, Or Retracted Space Science From This Year

It’s been a good year for science with all sorts of awe-inspiring, beautiful, or weird discoveries. But not every story survived the followup. Here’s the space science stories that fell apart under scrutiny, faded on reconsideration, or didn’t make sense from the start. Image credit: Steffen Richter/Harvard University Gravitational Waves Continue To Elude Detection Image…

This was Italian astronaut Sam Cristoforetti‘s view from the International Space Station late yesterday. The textures on that spiral of clouds makes you want to reach right out and touch it, doesn’t it? [Sam Cristoforetti]

Bill Nye’s Answer to Fermi Paradox: Be Patient

The Fermi Paradox is a question that stumps and fascinates scientists (and pretty much everyone else, let’s be real.) The question, originally posed by Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, wonders at why there are theoretically so many habitable planets in the universe, but humanity has yet to make contact with any form of intelligent life. https://gizmodo.com/the-fermi-paradox-where-the-hell-are-the-other-earths-1580345495…

A Last-Second Science Gift Guide For The Unprepared

While science doesn’t have a time machine to retroactively address your lack of adequate preparedness for the holiday season, we can still help you with that dawning realization that you still aren’t ready for Christmas Eve and the last night of Chanukah. Bake a Tribute To Dinoaurs Requires: cookie dough and an oven. Bake up…

We Found a New and Cheaper Way to Get to Mars

There are myriad reasons why getting from Earth to Mars is hard, but chief among them are two 1) the massive amount of fuel needed and 2) a launch window that is limited to every 26 months, when the two planets are in optimal alignment. A couple of mathematicians have calculated a new path to…

Figure painters will appreciate this Lego build

Having done some some miniature painting in my day, I really appreciate this build. Peter Reid has done an amazing job of giving the impression of these Lego minifigures, still on the sprue, being customized for the Exo-Suit. The scene here is perfect, from the tools and paintbrushes to the amazing tile work for the…

This Is How Organisms Are Tested to See if They Can Survive Space

Ever wondered how astronauts go about working out if organisms can survive the stresses of space? Largely by strapping them to the side of the International Space Station is how. In this image, you can see the European Space Agency’s Expose-R2 project. The unit, attached to the outside of the ISS, contains 46 species of…

You Must Watch the Acid Trip of a Light Show Orion Produced on Reentry

A few days ago, we saw what astronauts see when they reenter Earth’s atmosphere in the Soyuz space capsule. But that awesome array of sparks and glowing heat waves pales in comparison to new reentry footage recently taken from a camera on the Orion crew module. The video is incredible. An interior camera is pointed…

NASA: Let’s Explore Venus in Solar Zeppelins and Build Cloud City There

There’s a lot we can learn about Earth’s atmosphere from studying Venus, however, it’s Venus’ crushingly thick air—precisely what we want to study—that is preventing us from sending manned missions there. But this radical zeppelin could finally help us unlock the secrets of our celestial neighbor. We’ve remotely visited Mars nearly two dozen times already,…

Kepler Just Discovered a New Super-Earth, Against All Odds 

In May 2013, NASA’s exoplanet-seeking spacecraft, Kepler, seemed doomed. Two of four wheels that stabilized its telescope had malfunctioned—and NASA appealed to scientists from around the world for ideas to salvage its mission. Yesterday, it announced the discovery of a brand-new super-Earth 180 light years from our own. “To paraphrase Mark Twain, the report of…

The Weirdest Stuff We’ve Launched Into Space

From the minute we started sending humans into space, authorized and unauthorized paraphernalia have gone with them. Even unmanned spacecraft hauled oddities to the far reaches of our solar system. Here are a few items that have reached where most of us will never go. Pornography When NASA sent Apollo 12 to the Moon in…

These distinctive underwater features of the Great Bahamas Bank are made of limestone, largely from the skeletal fragments of marine organisms, which has been accumulating for over 100 million years and is shaped by underwater currents. The image was captured the European Space Agency’s Landsat-8. [ESA]