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It's Friday, which means it's time to embark on the greatest adventure of them all — the weekend. But before you leave for your vessel of exploration, let's celebrate by putting some inspiring scenes of space adventure on your computer desktop. More »
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Fringe keeps proving over and over that everybody's sexier when they come from a dark, dystopian alternate universe. But it's basically a law of science fiction that the evil twin is always the sexier one. More »
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We've looked at the Carina Nebula before, but we've never looked into it. While the nebula is plenty beautiful in regular optical wavelengths, this infrared image allows us to peer behind the thick gas clouds to see the gorgeousness inside. 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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13,000 feet beneath the surface of Antarctica's vast ice sheet rests the otherworldly Lake Vostok. Home to some of the most extreme conditions on Earth, Vostok has remained isolated from the rest of the world for 20 million years, and completely inaccessible to mankind. Until now. 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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The fierce ultraviolet radiation given off by the young stars of NGC 3324 has carved this giant cavity in space. And, thanks to our old friend pareidolia, that boundary between different gases looks an awful lot like a person's profile. More »
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Could space jumping be the next extreme sport? After all the objects that have gone into suborbital space: teddy bears, Lego men, plates of sushi, one man plans to send himself up to the edge, and then leap back down again. More »
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Life will be sweet on Newt Gingrich's moon base. We'll all wear awesome retrofuturistic jumpsuits, children will serve as janitors at their own schools, and Vice-Admiral Herman Cain will be there to greet us with a warm secret space handshake. And, of course, President Newt will rule over it all, defending truth, divorce, and the lunar way. More »
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How did astronauts learn to walk in space? In part, they learned from the animal kingdom's master of the freefall: the common house cat. More »
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In 1950, the American Museum of Natural History's Hayden Planetarium promoted its Conquest of Space exhibition with a peculiar stunt. They solicited letters from the general public, inviting them to reserve seats on the first flight into space. Letters poured in from around the country, reflecting the public's grand space age dreams. More »
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Want to take a road trip through our solar system? Warm up your Volvo and point yourself toward Stockholm, where a 950-km scale model of the solar system begins. You can tour Sweden while getting a sense of our solar neighborhood's scale. 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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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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We usually think of black holes as cosmic destroyers, heartlessly devouring anything — even a star — that enters their enormous gravitational pull. But there might be another, more helpful side to supermassive black holes that we're only just discovering. More »
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This newly discovered planet is just 22 light-years away. Its discoverers are calling it the "new best candidate" to support water, and possibly life. The planet's unique features could even make it the ideal home for creatures like the Predator! More »
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One of the great fears of the early space race was what effect microgravity would have on human explorers — and while we know it won't instantly die when leaving the atmosphere, there's still a lot we don't know about the long term effects of low gravity. If we ever want to set up a long-term space settlement, it'd be good to have some idea what happens to the body in those environments... and according to some new research, it isn't good. More »
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Buried over two miles beneath the East Antarctic Ice sheet lurks Lake Vostok — an isolated body of subglacial water, removed from the rest of the world for more than twenty million years. Now, Russian researchers are just a few meters of ice away from entering an environment unlike any we've ever seen... at least, not here on Earth. More »
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Seriously. This map suggests that unless you live in California, a smattering of states out East, or a small handfull of other states sprinkled across the country, you're looking at a very grave problem when it comes to scientific illiteracy in your community's youth (and, presumably, its population in general). Come to think of it, this map should really concern you, no matter where you live. 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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If you haven't heard of Space Exploration Technologies (aka SpaceX) yet, chances are you will soon. The space transport company is leading the charge to privatize space flight in the wake of the U.S.'s decommissioned space program, and later this year will begin making delivery runs to and from the ISS with its unmanned Dragon spacecraft. More »
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Every so often, incredibly energetic charged particles will reach Earth - and we're not sure what could possibly be powerful enough to generate these cosmic rays. Now we might have the answer...and it's just an absurdly specific set of circumstances. 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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One of the weirdest of the solar system's moons is Iapetus. This is a medium-sized (1,471 km (914 miles) satellite of Saturn, orbiting about 3,561,300 km (2,213,000 miles) from the planet. Seen from the surface of Iapetus, Saturn looms about four times larger than a full Moon in Earth's sky. 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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Most images of nebulas make them look flat, so you aren't able to appreciate the true splendor of what a nebula would really look like if you were to fly toward it through space. But now you can. The Space Telescope Science Institute, which runs the Hubble and Webb telescopes, has been using data gathered by the telescopes to create 3D images of familiar nebulae. And as you can see from these videos, it looks breathtaking. Above, you can see a fly-by of the Helix Nebula, created when gas was blown off as a Sun-sized star collapsed into a white dwarf. This vid also lets you compare the original 2D image with the 3D rendering. 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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Sailors have navigated by the light of Polaris for centuries, but all is not well with the North Star. There's something wrong with its light, and the best explanation might be that it's losing the equivalent of Earth's mass every year. 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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The 1969 moon landing was one of humanity's most impressive achievements, but there was always a chance that things could go terribly wrong. But if the worst happened, and Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were commended to the void of space, Nixon had a stirring speech prepared, one that celebrated the spirit of exploration and the nobility of our lunar dreams. More »
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When I picture life on Newt Gingrich's moon colony, I picture women and men long nights spent hunched over a microscope, or working in the oxygen processing center, where they'll convert moon water to breathable air. But one Madison Avenue firm had a very different view of life in space, one where women's key contribution was keeping the habitat spic-and-span. 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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Late last Sunday, the Sun unleashed an M9-class solar flare, showering Earth with subatomic particles that gave rise to one of the biggest geomagnetic storms in recent history. The resulting aurorae, which were even brighter than usual in the planet's northernmost latitudes, were an absolute marvel to behold. More »
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Fritz Goro was one of the most important science photographers of all time, capturing the huge scientific advances after World War II, and the start of the Space Race. And now Life Magazine has a breathtaking gallery of Goro's most unforgettable images, which show us the cutting-edge science of the 1950s and 1960s. They're beautiful, but they also illuminate the world we live in today. 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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The Agricultural Research Service produced scanning electron microscope images of what frost would look like on Mars. And it isn't water crystals that form this frost — it's carbon dioxide. 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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