Space & Spaceflight

NASA Just Found the Two Most Perfect Planets for Life Yet

Ever feel like you’re all alone in this big, ol’ universe? Don’t. Because NASA has just discovered two prime planet candidates that fulfill nearly every condition necessary to life that we’re aware of. And according to William Borucki, chief scientist for NASA’s Kepler telescope, these two are the best bets we’ve ever found. There was…

Even Wringing a Wet Cloth Is Magical in Space

Astronaut Chris Hadfield continues to make us all insanely jealous of the time he’s been spending on the International Space Station with another video showing what day-to-day life is like orbiting the Earth. Except this time he shows what happens when you wring a soaking wet cloth in zero gravity, and the results are almost…

NASA’s Next Rocket Engine Could Be A Blast From the Past

Jeff Bezos isn’t the only person interested in vintage NASA technology. Public and private entities alike are actively taking a second look at the Rocketdyne F-1 engines that helped notch Saturn V rockets as the tallest, heaviest, and most powerful rocket ever operated—even today, forty years after the demise of the Apollo program. https://gizmodo.com/jeff-bezos-has-rescued-the-apollo-11-rockets-from-the-o-5991543 All…

New Nano-Suits Can Help Bugs Survive a Space-Like Vacuum

Human space travel comes with a host of problems, not the least of which is our general inability to survive in a vacuum without, you know, dying. But a new technique that’s done wonders for fruit fly larvae and could one day lead to the same for humans may have solved that problem. By bombarding…

How to Catch an Asteroid

That Pet Rock of yours lose a bit of its luster over the years? Not to worry, NASA plans to put one big enough for the whole world to share in orbit around the moon by the start of the next decade. Here’s how. You Should Do This If: You’ve ever wanted to study a…

If You Named A Planet Recently You Probably Didn’t, You Know, Officially Name The Planet

The International Astronomical Union is sitting down with the Internet to have a little talk. Just because some kids on the playground say they’ll let you name an exoplanet for $5 doesn’t mean you should give them $5. First of all they’re not the boss of you, and second of all they have nothing to…

How To Sleep In Space

While you are sinking into you soft, pillow-top mattress—or pile of trash—there are a handful of human beings in space who take to their nightly respite a little differently, by strapping themselves into a zero-g space coffin. Apparently it’s better than it sounds. Chris Hadfield, everyone’s favorite ISS explain-gineer offers up the details. Weightless or…

If Earth 2 Exists, TESS Will Find It

The Kepler telescope that launched in 2009 is is no slouch when it comes to hunting for exoplanets. The system is charged with investigating the more than 145,000 stars within its view in the hopes of finding habitable planets but those stars constitute just 0.28 percent of the sky. Luckily, there’s a new orbital telescope…

This Map Shows Every Single Photo of Earth the ISS Has Taken—All One Million of Them

Astronauts’ stays on the International Space Station generally last for around 6 months or more, so it makes sense that they’d start getting hit with a little nostalgia for the motherland they’re so casually encircling. How nostalgic, you ask? Very: 1,129,177 photos worth, to be exact. Rocket scientist Nathan Bergey had the ingenious idea to…

Washington State Sure Looks Pretty From Space

You’d be forgiven for thinking that this was a beatuifully textured piece of modern art—but you’d be wrong. It is in fact a view of the rolling hills of farmland in the northwest United States, pictured by the Korea Aerospace Research Institute’s Kompsat-2 satellite. Snapped over Washington state, the image above shows Columbia County in…

The Sun Just Shot Off the Biggest, Most Spectacular Solar Flare of the Year

Early this morning, while most of us were resting peacefully in our beds, everyone’s favorite flaming ball of plasma decided to give NASA’s cameras a little show. More specifically, the Solar Dynamics Observatory managed to capture our sun’s biggest solar flare of the year thus far. Classified as an M6.5, it’s not the hugest solar…

The Stories of Poop Hidden in NASA’s Apollo 10 Mission Transcripts

During NASA’s Apollo 10 moon mission in 1969, not quite everything went to plan. But we’re not talking Apollo 13-style disasters here—instead, we’re talking about some toilet-based issues. Clearly the astronauts in question—Thomas P. Stafford, John W. Young and Eugene A. Cernan—hadn’t quite gotten to grips with how to go to the toilet in space,…

Administrator Bolden says “NASA does not have a human lunar mission in its portfolio and we are not planning for one.”

Is the Vacuum Of Space Strong Enough to Suck Up the Earth’s Oceans?

When you think of the vast emptiness of space, one of the first things to come to mind is probably violent decompression. But is the vacuum of space powerful enough that it could suck out an entire ocean through some sort of gigantic space straw? Well, it’s not quite that simple, as Vsauce explains, because…

White House: NASA’s Next Big Mission Will Be to Capture an Asteroid

There have been rumors about NASA’s next major project ever since Senator Bill Nelson of Florida mentioned some jazz about wrangling an asteroid. Now a White House official has confirmed the plans to NBC, explaining the goal is to get samples within the decade, and then think about Mars. The senior Obama administration official, who…

Watch a Massive Black Hole Snack on a Planet

Over 47 million light years away, in a galaxy called NGC 4845, there’s one hungry black hole. In fact, scientists have watched in awe as, soon after it stirred from dormancy, it chomped away at a planet 30 times the mass of Jupiter. This video, by the European Space Agency, shows how the—entirely unexpected—event happened.…

This Fantastic Website Shows How Far Mars Really Is from Earth (Spoiler: It’s Faaaaar)

This ingenious website made by David Paliwoda shows how far Mars is from Earth in a metric all us Internet lovers understand: pixels. If Earth was a 100 pixels wide, how far would Mars be? To start off, the moon would be 3000 pixels away (and 27 pixels wide). Mars? 428,00 pixels away. And boy…

The Earth Has Never Looked More Gorgeous from Space

NASA just released its 2012 compilation of the best views of Earth from orbit over the past year. They’re stunning. They mix “true-color” imagery with data visualizations and 3D imagery from some of the newest satellites in NASA’s fleet. Time-lapses, weather patterns, even the movement of currents—the way NASA sees our planet is something beautiful…

This $2B Cosmic Ray Detector Is Unravelling the Secrets of the Universe

Finding the Higgs Boson particle is a revolutionary scientific discovery, sure, but CERN isn’t the only scientific body rewriting our understanding of elementary physics. An international team of researchers have just announced that the massive cosmic ray detector protruding from the ISS may have at long last detected dark matter. The cosmic ray detector is…

Would You Accept A One-Way Trip to a Colony on Mars?

Now that nuclear-thermal rockets are becoming a reality, we may very well be shipping off the first human pioneers to Mars (both safely and efficiently) in the not-too-distant future. This, of course, leaves the question of exactly who will become the first generation of Martian-Earthlings. The prospect of actually being a founder of a colony…