Space & Spaceflight

Buy a Plot of the Moon From the Man Who Decided to Be Its Landlord

Meet Dennis M. Hope, 65, of Gardnerville, Nevada. Dennis owns the Moon. As The New York Times explains, Dennis claims to have filed a declaration of ownership with the United Nations. It’s all legal, guys! You see, the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 reads: No nation by appropriation shall have sovereignty or control over any…

A Fantastical Look at Fixing the Curiosity Rover

After spending roughly $2.5 billion to build the Curiosity rover and deliver it to Mars, there’s no way NASA would let something as trivial as a mechanical breakdown or software glitch stop its journey—not when we could just send up a repair-bot to fix it. Nicolas Hommel and Matthieu Findinier produced this bubbly animated short…

An Astrophotography Crash Course That Will Have You Seeing Stars

Astrophotography is one of the most complex types of photography, blending artistic talents with deep scientific understanding and technical ability. So, if you’re just starting out, it can be a complicated topic to get a handle on—but this video should help. The most important thing to consider is, perhaps obviously, your telescope. In this half-hour…

Watch This Glider Fall From the Edge of Space in First-Person

When Felix Baumgartner jumped from the edge of space, we got some crazy, crazy footage out of the deal, but it was just a little bit…dizzying. Flying a remote-controlled glider down from similar heights doesn’t take nearly as much balls, but damned if the footage isn’t just as amazing. https://gizmodo.com/first-head-cam-video-of-supersonic-space-jump-5951725 This crazy flight has been…

NASA’s Neutral Buoyancy Lab Can Fill 9 Olympic Swimming Pools

One does not simply build an International Space Station. It takes years of planning and, for the astronauts charged with its assembly, months of training and Extra-Vehicular Activity (EVA) practice in a simulated micro-gravity environment—that also happens to be the world’s largest indoor body of water. It’s known as the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory (NBL)—a 202…

I Want to Live in This Retro Future Animation of Life on Mars

Created by Czech designer Lukas Vojir, this animation is a retro-futuristic short commercial for a make believe life on Mars. The style of the animation is wonderful, I just love how everything unfolds on the geometrically shaped red planet, and the world is imaginative and perfectly rooted in our past thought of what the future…

NASA Finds Space Invaders Deep in the Cosmos

NASA’s Hubble Telescope peered deep into a cluster of galaxies called Abell 68 recently, and found a wicked space invader that looks like it’s headed right for us. Brace for impact! So what’s a classic video game baddie doing hanging out two-billion light-years away? NASA explains that the gravitational field surrounding the galaxies works like…

A Map That Shows How Salty the Seas Are

Some briny deeps are brinier than others. The Atlantic Ocean has two huge “deserts” of extra-salty water, the result of little rainfall and lots of evaporation. These tangy tracts have been revealed by NASA’s Aquarius instrument, which is aboard Argentina’s Aquarius/SAC-D spacecraft and is dedicated to studying the salt content of the oceans. NASA has…

Relax, Mars fans: Curiosity is no longer running in Safe Mode, and should be back on its wheels in no time. Phew!

Can You Find Venus Hiding Inside Saturn’s Rings?

If you’re looking at the picture above and now checking your screen to see if you have a dead pixel, don’t worry, you don’t. That’s just Venus hiding through Saturn’s rings. Taken by the Cassini, Earth’s twin planet looks like a blinding white speck of dust. NASA says the picture was captured approximately 498,000 miles…

Don’t Freak Out, But Mars Rover Curiosity Is Having Its First Big Problem

Considering what it’s involved, Mars Rover Curiosity’s mission has been going really well. Staggeringly well. But that couldn’t last forever. The rover has hit its first real road bump with a gnarly computer failure that’s going to delay all the science-ing for at least a week. https://gizmodo.com/why-nasas-mars-curiosity-rover-landing-will-be-seven-mi-5920588 On Wednesday of this week, one of Curiosity’s…

Here’s How We Go to Space Now

This morning, Elon Musk’s SpaceX program shot its third rocket into space. The Falcon 9 carries with it a Dragon cargo capsule, and will deliver supplies to ISS astronauts not entirely unlike a 19th century freight train delivering mining equipment to California. The launch, as you can see in the video above, went off without…

This Is How the Universe Draws In the Sky

Oh Universe, you will never cease to amaze me, with all your galaxies and your pulsars and supernovas and your planets and your alien civilizations that never show up and all that starstuff we love so much. You know, like the fact that you draw perfect spirographs in the sky all the time. Just take…

Another Reason To Be an Astronaut: You Get To Hang With This Adorable Zero G Robot

Robots aren’t only taking over our duties as factory workers and amusement park guides. They’re also slowly taking over our cool jobs too, like on the International Space Station, where Kibo will serve to entertain Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata with inspirational tweets from earth—and also look adorable floating around in zero gravity. Based on the…

This Black Hole Spins at (Almost) the Speed of Light

NASA and the ESA have teamed up to measure how fast a black hole, that weighs 2 million times more than our sun, spins—and the result’s mind boggling. Using two X-ray space observatories, the space agencies have measured the spin of the black hole which lies at the center of a galaxy called NGC 1365.…

NASA Explains What Exploded Over Russia

Here is the definitive video from NASA about what happened over Russia earlier this month. It’s interesting because though we had pegged the asteroid 2012 DA14 to pass us by, we never saw the Russian meteorite coming because telescopes couldn’t see it since it flew from the direction of the sun. So what happened? To…

The Suit Won’t Save You: Four Ways Space Can Kill You Dead

Turns out, being blown out of an airlock and turning into a meat popsicle after succumbing to hypoxia isn’t so bad. At least, not when compared to the multitude of other deadly maladies that await you in the depths of space. Here are just a few ways that interplanetary exploration is conspiring to kill us…

Star Trek Trumps Mythology in Naming Pluto’s New Moon

Due to popular demand, one of Pluto’s recently discovered moons is to be named Vulcan, after the fictional home of Star Trek’s Spock. And that makes no kind of sense. The name Vulcan was suggested by William Shatner, then reinforced by Leonard Nimoy. Over 450,000 people voted to name the moon, in a poll run…

5 Amazing Scientific Discoveries We Don’t Know What to Do With

Every day, scientists make discoveries that change the way we live. But sometimes, just sometimes, they achieve results that are so extraordinary or unexpected that they literally don’t know what to do with them. Here are five of the most puzzling. Mind-bending material properties In January, a team of physicists from Rutgers and MIT published…

Why Does This Image of the Mount Etna Volcano Eruption from Space Look So Weird?

Because Earth can sometimes look like an Impressionist painting from space, NASA added colors to the Mount Etna volcano eruption to separate what from what. The false-color image combines shortwave infrared, near-infrared and green light in the RGB channels. It looks like Earth on acid. As you can imagine, the bright red in the image…