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An Elusive Phantom Planet Remains Hidden from NASA’s WISE Mission
NASA’s WISE spacecraft’s infrared vision sees plenty of low-mass stars and brown dwarfs (green dot), but no Planet X. (NASA) A recent study of data collected by NASA’s Wide-Field Infrared Explorer...
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NASA Sends Fruit Flies to Space to Prep for Mars Missions
In 1968, two members of the Apollo 7 crew developed head colds. Crankiness ensued. Crew members, from the left, are Command Module Pilot Donn Eisele, Commander Walter Schirra, Jr. and Lunar Module...
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NASA’s LADEE Spacecraft Set to Crash Land on the Moon
An artist’s depiction of LADEE in orbit around the moon. (Dana Berry/NASA Ames) A NASA mission designed here in the Bay Area has solved a 42-year-old mystery. The LADEE mission – whose launch we...
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NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope Shows Us Something New: A Disintegrating Asteroid
Hubble Space Telescope image of asteroid P/2013 R3 break-up. (STScI/NASA) Upholding a long-standing tradition of showing us things in space that we have never seen before, the Hubble Space Telescope...
View ArticleMonday’s SpaceX Launch Cancelled; Next Opportunity is April 18
Update: Monday’s launch was cancelled because of a helium leak. The next window for launch is this coming Friday, April 18. Original story: SpaceX is launching a rocket this afternoon. The live webcast...
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Scientists Find A Planet Like Earth
The artistic concept of Kepler-186f is the result of scientists and artists collaborating to imagine the appearance of these distant worlds. (NASA) Bay Area scientists are among the NASA planet hunters...
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NASA’s Cassini Divines Hidden Waters of Saturn’s Moon Enceladus
Artist concepts of interior of Enceladus and NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. (NASA) Over 500 years since Vasco Nunez de Balboa “discovered” the Pacific Ocean (never mind that the Chinese, Japanese, and...
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Citing Budget Concerns, NASA Defends Long-Term Plan To Reach Mars in 20 Years
Earth and Mars / NASA Mars has been a prominent figure in the lens of human awareness, imagination, and sense of adventure for centuries. It’s a fiery spark in the night, a celestial laser-pointer dot...
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Major Solar Storm Narrowly Misses Earth
Super CME of July 22 2012. The sun, hidden behind the black disk, is located at the white circle. (STEREO/NASA) On July 22, 2012, a solar Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) of possibly the greatest recorded...
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Kepler 10c: An Unexpected Heavyweight Earth
Artist concept of exoplanet Kepler 10c (David Aguilar/Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) How big can an Earth-like planet be? Astronomers thought they had a pretty good handle on this...
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Carbon-Tracking Satellite Will Monitor Earth’s ‘Breathing’
Artist’s conception of the OCO-2 satellite in orbit. Scientists hope it will yield the most precise picture yet of Earth’s carbon cycle. (NASA-JPL) It took five years, two launch vehicles and more than...
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NASA’s Opportunity Rolls a Record Distance on Mars
Opportunity’s record breaking milestone marker: Lunokhod 2 Crater. (NASA/JPL) One of NASA’s most senior and still-operational spacecraft reached a milestone: the rover Opportunity completed its first...
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NASA’s MAVEN Spacecraft Will Explore Mars’ Upper Atmosphere
Artist concept of NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft. (NASA) On September 21, NASA’s MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution) spacecraft will go boldly where no one has gone before: to the very top of the...
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NASA’s Curiosity Rover Arrives at the Foot of Mars’ Mount Sharp
Rock strata exposed along the margins of the valleys in the “Pahrump Hills” region on Mars. (Curiosity/NASA) Over two years since landing on the gravely floor of Gale Crater on Mars, NASA’s Mars...
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Join a Series of Geological Treasure Hunts With Earth Science Week 2014
Mammoth Rocks, Sonoma County (Andrew Alden) Every year, around the opposite side of the calendar from Earth Day, is a loosely organized event called Earth Science Week. (It also has a Facebook page.)...
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NASA’s MAVEN Mission Investigates Mars’ Atmosphere
Maps of carbon and oxygen coronas of Mars’ extended atmosphere. (MAVEN/NASA) NASA’s latest mission to Mars, MAVEN (Mars Atmospheric and Volatile Evolution), entered Martian orbit less than a month ago...
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Want to Go to Mars? A Cheaper Alternative Resides in Chile’s Atacama Desert
“Desert selfie” in the driest place on the planet: the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. If you want to go to Mars but can’t quite afford the hundreds of billions of dollars for a ticket, there is...
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NASA’s Curiosity Rover Finds Evidence of Possible Long-Term Water on Mars
An outcrop of lake bed deposits captured by Curiosity’s MastCam in August, 2014 (MSL/NASA) On Monday, NASA announced some surprising results from its exploration of Gale Crater on Mars by the Mars...
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New Horizons Spacecraft Wakes up for Its Historic Fly-by of Pluto
Artist concept of New Horizons at the Pluto system. (NASA) Only 84 years after its discovery in 1930 by Clyde Tombaugh, it is the eve of our first-ever close-up look at everyone’s favorite dwarf...
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NASA Satellite Could Help Weather Forecasts, Drought Management
NASA’s SMAP satellite will capture microwave radiation from the Earth to measure soil moisture. (NASA) Thursday morning a rocket was scheduled to lift off from Vandenberg Air Force Base on California’s...
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