Bigelow Aerospace’s inflatable BEAM module — a new lightweight activity module, part of Bigelow’s continued endeavors toward putting into use a wide range of portable expandable habitation spaces, including the living-and-working-space BA-330 (pictured above) — has been scheduled for a March NASA mission to the space station. The Bigelow Expandable Activity Module will be sent to the space […]

This is ISS’s HDEV (High Definition Earth Viewing) experiment —  a live HD stream from several cameras mounted to the External Payload Facility of the European Space Agency’s Columbus module, and has been broadcasting since April 30, 2014. To protect the cameras, they are encased in pressurized, temperature-controlled housing. Viewing notes: A black screen is normal when the […]

The active sand dunes of Mars were reached by NASA’s Curiosity rover last month, and Friday NASA released some of Curiosity’s latest photography. The Bagnold Dunes are as high as two stories, and compose the bottom portion of a layered mountain Curiosity is trekking up this month. Some of Curiosity’s latest photos show the bot’s view […]

The Geminids — “the King of Meteor Showers” — will rain down around 100 to 150 multi-colored slow-moving streaks per hour this weekend, visible from anywhere, but the best views will be for those in the Northern Hemisphere. The show will peak over the night of Sunday, December 13 — between midnight and morning with the highest activity […]

The red planet’s future rings Mars will most likely develop rings similar to Saturn’s, when its largest moon, Phobos, gets close enough to break apart, according to a recently published study in Nature Geoscience. Mars would be the only inner planet with rings if this took place. Scientists predict it will happen in about 20 – 40 million […]

President Obama signed the U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act (H.R. 2262) into law Wednesday. This law recognizes the right of U.S. citizens to own asteroid resources they obtain and encourages the commercial exploration and utilization of resources from asteroids. “This is the single greatest recognition of property rights in history,” commented Eric Anderson, co-founder and […]

The International Space Station orbits the Earth at 28,000 km/h, fast enough to make it from our planet to the moon and back in a day. The 1 million pound craft carries its six passengers around the circumference of the Earth every 90 minutes at that speed. And now, thanks to Open Notify‘s API and […]

First-of-its-kind NASA mission will also demonstrate ability to deflect asteroids NASA has detailed ARM: its mission to send a robotic spacecraft to an asteroid, pluck a boulder off of the surface, and put the rock into orbit around the moon. It will also use an Enhanced Gravity Tractor to redirect the course of the asteroid. The Asteroid […]

The prevailing assumption about dark matter is that has no interaction with light, but European physicists who investigated a possible signature of dark matter at the edges of theM101 Pinwheel galaxy now believe that light may be interacting with dark matter to produce “light halos” — detectable glows around the edges spiral galaxies. “Dark Matter can […]

The third Orbital Sciences cargo mission to the International Space Station was set to launch Monday, but was prevented by a stray boat which had entered restricted waters southeast of the launch pad in Wallops Island, Virginia. The launch was postponed until Tuesday due to public safety concerns, according to officials. The Monday launch window […]

The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics held a meeting last week to discuss the definition of what a planet is, and whether Pluto–which had its planet status removed in 2006 after a vote by the International Astronomical Union (IAU)–should be considered a planet. Three experts paneled the meeting, and each argued for or against Pluto as a […]