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While most proposals for future space exploration involve trips to the Moon or Mars, we don't actually have to land anywhere to break new ground. This plan would establish an outpost further from Earth than any human has ever gone. More »
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This extreme closeup of Saturn's moon Enceladus is the work of the Cassini orbiter, which snapped this awesome image way back in January 2011. Here, the satellite glows a golden brown as it basks in the light of its planet. More »
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In the most comprehensive analysis of its kind to date, scientists have used NASA satellites to gauge just how much of the world's ice has been lost to the oceans. Their results? Data collected over eight years of the past decade indicates that melting ice raised sea levels worldwide by an average of 1.48 millimeters. More »
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Oh, you've been skydiving? That's nice. Extreme athlete Felix Baumgartner is underwhelmed by your "achievement." More »
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This is devastating news. The BBC is reporting that ExoMars — a joint program between NASA and the European Space Agency with Martian missions scheduled for 2016 and 2018 — is on the ropes, owing to America's budgetary woes. More »
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Think of all the work that goes into getting a birds-eye view of our home planet. Now imagine how hard it would be to snap a photo that manages to capture our entire galaxy. More »
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The CERES Experiment is a NASA project that measures Earth's incoming and outgoing energy. The picture above is a look at Earth's reflected heat energy, as it would be seen from space. More »
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Last week, NASA unveiled the highest-resolution photograph of Earth ever taken... or, rather, the highest-resolution photograph of half the Earth. More »
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Have you ever wondered how breathtaking celestial images like this one came to be? Believe it or not, that isn't how they appear when telescopes like Hubble first lay their eyes on them, and getting them to look the way they do is actually a fairly involved process. More »
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Have you met Ebb and Flow? The twin spacecraft entered lunar orbit last month with aims of uncovering the mystery of the Moon's formation. More »
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Greek fire. Damascus steel. These are two technological innovations whose secrets are said to be lost to time. Even the original schematics for the Apollo missions have disappeared into the mists of history, forever hidden inside hopelessly obsolete computers. How do we lose technologies that were once so important? Some say that they aren't really lost, and are working on rediscovering them. More »
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NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer, or IBEX, has spent the last four years exploring the very edge of our solar system, where giant magnetic bubbles repel incoming charged particles while neutral ones stream in on their way to the Sun. More »
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Every cosmic phenomenon deserves its own unique claim to fame, but Abell 2052 deserves better than this. Its gas jerks back and forth like a drink sloshing around in a glass. It's like the cosmic equivalent of a tipsy uncle. More »
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You're all familiar with Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince, right? If not, drop what you're doing. Go read it. Then come back. More »
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This eerie patch of blackness in the middle of a busy star cluster may look like a rather misshapen black hole, but it's actually something even stranger. It's also quite possibly the loneliest, darkest, coldest place in the entire cosmos. More »
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Chalk another one up to NASA's Kepler Mission. The Agency's team of planet-hunters announced yesterday the discovery of 11 new planetary systems, which together harbor 26 brand spanking new planets. More »
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Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has promised us a permanent Moon base by 2020. Many people have been calling Newt's vow a publicity stunt, while others have chimed in by attacking the idea of a lunar base in and of itself, with assertions like "real scientists know [a Moon base] is fantasy." More »
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Who would ever imagine that sand dunes could look so incredible? In this beautiful image, sand trapped in an impact crater in the Red Planet's Moachis Terra region have been sculpted by the winds of Mars into a vast and variegated landscape. More »
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Reason Magazine just posted a must-read article from its February 2012 issue by Timescape author Gregory Benford, in which he examines the expansive dream of space exploration propounded in the early 1950s by Wernher Von Braun. And he concludes that even though NASA seems to be scaling back and our dreams of interplanetary exploration have come to a standstill, there's still hope — including a possible Mars expedition by 2033. More »
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NASA has just released this mind-blowing photograph Earth, which was captured earlier this month by the Agency's most recently launched Earth-observing satellite, Suomi NPP. More »
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In late 2010, NASA scientists announced the discovery of microbes in California's Mono Lake that used arsenic instead of phosphorus in their DNA. The study quickly came under intense criticism — and now we may be about to refute it entirely. More »
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Good news! After everybody was so disappointed that NASA was holding up the release of Apogee of Fear, Richard Garriott's eight-minute science fiction movie filmed aboard the International Space Station, the agency appears to have had a change of heart. The other day, a NASA spokesperson told Wired: More »
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We've been recording global surface temperatures since 1880, the beginning of what meteorologists call the modern record. In that time, worldwide temperatures have been on the rise. Now, NASA scientists are reporting that the global average surface temperature in 2011 was the ninth warmest that we've ever recorded. So what's the big deal? In the last 132 years, nine of the ten warmest on record have occurred in the last eleven years.

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For the first time ever, scientists have witnessed and recorded a comet disintegrating in the Sun's atmosphere. The icy body — dubbed "comet C/2011 N3 (SOHO)" — was originally observed back in July. Today, the team that observed the comet flaming out of existence has published an in-depth analysis of what really happened. More »
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In the last several hundred years, human activity has shifted large quantities of the world's carbon from long-term storage (i.e. carbon bound up in rocks, fossil fuels, and forests) into forms of short-term storage such as croplands and pastures, which tend to store less carbon for shorter periods of time. More »
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Remember the picture of the Pratt Whitney Rocketdyne engines that looked an awful lot like a band of Daleks in disguise? That picture may have done a good job of making space shuttle engines look like a bunch of malevolent cyborgs, but there wasn't really anything in the photo to give you a sense of just how impressive these things really are. More »
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This gorgeous image is the work of the Spitzer Space Telescope, which snapped this infrared photo of the Cygnus-X star forming region in 2009. Every bright blue dot represents a star hotter and more massive than anything we can imagine. More »
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What is this strange astronomical formation? A more fanciful interpretation is that it's a vast cosmic eye, but then its official designation - planetary nebula - isn't much more helpful, considering it's neither a planet nor even really a nebula. More »
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Richard Garriott spent $30 million of his own money to be a "space tourist" aboard the International Space Station, a quest that's chronicled in the new documentary Man on a Mission, in theaters now. But while he was aboard the I.S.S., Garriott shot an eight-minute movie called Apogee of Fear, which he says is the first science fiction movie ever shot in space. And NASA won't let us see that film. Why not? More »
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Humans produce two flammable gases: hydrogen and methane. Flammable gases accumulate in an enclosed space and can ignite. Astronauts are humans who spend lots of time in enclosed space. The logic is irrefutable. So, what's the risk to farting astronauts? More »
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This doesn't look much like a galaxy, but it is in fact the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of the biggest satellite galaxies of our Milky Way. This awesome infrared image reveals the real look of this galaxy like never before. More »
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More than 60 moons are known to orbit Saturn, but few of them are as visually striking as Iapetus. Named formally after the Greek mythological Titan, Iapetus is sometimes referred to as the "painted," or "yin-yang" moon, due to puzzling variations in its surface composition. More »
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Every now and again the internet has the capacity to blow our dinky craniums to smithereens — this happens to be one of those moments. Some unplaceable Herculean conviction drove LEGO architect Ryan McNaught to build a 5.76-meter-tall recreation of the Saturn V rocket used for Apollo 11 out of 120,000 plastic bricks. More »
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Right at the center of this image, there's a dim orange dot. Somewhere around that dot, one of the stars in a binary system once went supernova, creating the vast red gaseous remnant you see all around it. More »
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NASA's Opportunity rover has been sending images of Mars back to Earth since 2004. Now, computer scientist Mark Powell, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, has developed a free app for iPhone and Android that wires these photos directly to your phone. More »
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NASA says they're "Pratt Whitney Rocketdyne engines" from space shuttles Endeavour and Atlantis... but we think they look an awful lot like incognito Dalek shipping containers. More »
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Back in September, NASA's planet-hunting satellite Kepler made one of its most dramatic discoveries when it spotted a planet orbiting two stars. But was this a one-of-a-kind cosmic freak, or are there lots of these strange planets? Now we know. More »
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The University of Arizona's High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera is an incredible piece of equipment. Currently circling the Red Planet aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the instrument is capable of capturing photographs of the Martian surface at unprecedented resolution, averaging about 25 centimeters per pixel. More »
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Back in November, NASA's next-generation Mars rover, Curiosity, set a course for the Red Planet. But it didn't actually chart a direct course; in order to keep Mars clean of microbes originating from here on Earth, NASA actually had to aim the spacecraft so that it would miss Mars. More »
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Bad puns aside, this is actually pretty cool. NASA has set up two webcams in the cleanroom of Goddard Space Flight Center, where engineers are busy assembling the James Webb Space Telescope — the deep space imaging apparatus that will allow us to see farther into space than ever before. More »
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