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Inside a very big and very clean room at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., nearly 30 workers dressed in white protective suits, goggles and blue booties cluster around the parts of a time machine. These parts — gold-covered mirrors, tennis-court-size sun shields, delicate infrared cameras — are slowly being put together to become the James Webb Space Telescope.

actual photo h/t Blazing Cat FurIn eleven hundred and seventy eight Muhammad sailed through the Hormuz strait.He had three ships that left from Persia; Heading out and sailing further Than anyone had sailed before To land upon America’s shore. MOTUS, 2014And that, my friends, is the legend of how Muslims discovered America, 300 years before Columbus. And that’s great news, just in time for Thanksgiving! It means Western Imperialism is off the hook for stealing and raping the Indians’ land, brutally killing Native Americans with long guns and small pox and introducing everything from racism, sexism, anti-gay bigotry, and the class...

Your physics teacher always told you this was true. You've never seen it until now. A lot of Newtonian physics happens in this hypothetical world where no outside forces act upon an object. But Earth isn't a vacuum, and outside forces are acting on objects all the time! Now, for the first time, you can see proof of what your physics teacher was telling you right in front of your eyes. Brian Cox visits NASA’s Space Power Facility in Ohio to see what happens when a bowling ball and a feather are dropped together under the conditions of outer space.

Scientists used to think that things were pretty chill over in the south hemisphere of Uranus. In fact, they thought it was one of the calmest regions of any of the gas giants. But in analyzing images taken nearly three decades ago by NASA's Voyager-2 spacecraft, researchers think they've found a kerfuffle of activity — which might indicate that there's something unusual about the planet's interior. If you look at these old photos of Uranus, the planet appears to be a stark, featureless ball. And even to scientists, who were able to identify more lively features of the gas giant,...

After a historic but awkward comet landing, the robot probe Philae is now stable and sending pictures - but there are concerns about its battery life. The lander bounced twice, initially about 1km back out into space, before settling in the shadow of a cliff, 1km from its intended target site. It may now be problematic to get enough sunlight to charge its battery systems. -- The key issue vexing controllers right now is the lighting conditions. Philae is receiving about 1.5 hours of illumination during every 12-hour rotation of the comet. This will be insufficient to top up its...

No one knows exactly why a NASA solar probe stopped talking to Earth six weeks ago, but it’s possible the spacecraft is out of power and is drifting without a way of calling for help, the agency said in an update. On Oct. 1, NASA suddenly lost contact with one of the two Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory (STEREO) spacecraft, which are currently examining the far side of the Sun. The probes are considered crucial for solar forecasting, so the loss is a blow. While the STEREO-Behind probe has been mute since then, the agency says “not all hope is lost”...

For many space-faring nations, ambitions for Mars run broad and deep. Now, add China to the list of countries with Mars in their sights. News reports from China disclosed that country is considering a future Mars rover mission, with a potential 2020 launch date. Additionally came other hints that China may be looking to develop a next-generation heavy-lift launch system. This new project, while early in development, reveals how Chinese aspirations are growing rapidly. Human space flight successes have been followed by recent lunar mission successes of the Yutu lunar rover and the Chang’e-5 T1 test of a sample return...

HIGH RESOLUTION IMAGE DETAILS Title Welcome to a comet Released 13/11/2014 10:39 am Copyright ESA/Rosetta/Philae/CIVA DescriptionRosetta’s lander Philae is safely on the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, as these first two CIVA images confirm. One of the lander’s three feet can be seen in the foreground. The image is a two-image mosaic. The full panoramicfrom CIVA will be delivered in this afternoon’s press briefing at 13:00 GMT/14:00 CET.

In the Apollo and Shuttle eras, America was cooperative, but pushed international comers. We led. Our leadership was built on looking forward. We trusted ourselves, embraced risk, understood daring exploration, and saw the future as worth winning. We had an itch to learn, to be first -- in a word -- to lead. In that process, high-technology jobs were unceasingly created in all 50 states, with spin-offs from microwaves to GPS, synthetic fabrics to iPhones, helping advance every sector of the U.S. economy.

The European Space Agency’s Philae lander has made space history by successfully reaching the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The landing, which took place at 11.03 AM ET, was accompanied by rapturous scenes at the ESA’s control room in Darmstadt, Germany. Philae is the first probe to land on a comet. …

Link to live TV feed

CHENNAI/BANGALORE: India created history on Wednesday, becoming the first country to successfully get a spacecraft into the Martian orbit on its maiden attempt. Indian Space Research Organisation's Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) spacecraft started orbiting the red planet at 7.47am, but it was only 12 minutes later —because of a time delay in radio signals travelling the 680 million km -- that scientists at Isro Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network in Bangalore, could erupt in joy as Prime Minister Narendra Modi stood a happy witness.

New images from NASA have captured the beautiful golden reflection of the sun on the polar sea of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. It is the latest image from a collaborative four year mission studying the Saturnine system. The mirror-like reflection, known as the specular point, is in the south of Titan's largest sea, Kraken Mare – just north of an island archipelago separating two separate parts of the sea. To the human eye, this would appear as a haze but through Cassini’s Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS), “real color information” is provided in wavelengths that correspond to atmospheric...

HomeScience NASA’s Eagle Works: The Manhattan project of space travel. Karim Immanuel Chemlal A working microwave thruster would radically cut the cost of satellites and space stations and extend their working life, drive a plethora of suddenly affordable deep-space missions, and take astronauts to Mars in days to weeks rather than months. In 2011 the NASA engineering directorate created the Advanced propulsion team unofficially known as the “Eagleworks”. This rock star team of scientists and engineers are headed by Harold ‘Sonny’ White, engineer and applied physicist of NASA’s propulsion team at the Johnson space centre. The goal of the Eagle...

So can we get off of Earth already and start building bases on the Moon or an asteroid? As highlighted in a recent Office of Science and Technology Policy blog post, one way to do that quickly could be to use resources on site. But how do we even get started? Can we afford to do it now, in this tough economic climate? Universe Today spoke with Philip Metzger, a senior research physicist at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, who has explored this subject extensively on his website and in published papers. He argues that to do space this way would...

Yesterday, Metzger outlined the rationale for establishing a base in the first place, while today he focuses on the cost. UT: Your 2012 paper specifically talks about how much development is needed on the Moon to make the industry “self-sustaining and expanding”, but left out the cost of getting the technology ready and of their ongoing operation. Why did you leave this assessment until later? How can we get a complete picture of the costs? PM: As we stated at the start of the paper, our analysis was very crude and was intended only to garner interest in the topic...

Apparently with the new Obama administration version of NASA, failure IS an option. One of the biggest space disasters ever, the Challenger disaster, was caused by FREEZING COLD WEATHER and idiotic management that ignored risks related to cold weather as warned by engineers. I have a pretty hard time believing that about a degree of warming is going to cause all these woes. That and the fact that NASA has had a nearly 9 year hurricane free window in Florida to not worry about launches. From EcoWatch: NASA programs are being put in jeopardy by the impacts of climate change,...

<p>NASA and Lockheed Martin [NYSE: LMT] have completed final assembly and testing of the Orion spacecraft. The spacecraft will remain inside NASA's Launch Abort System Facility at Kennedy Space Center until it rolls to launch pad 37 in November.</p> <p>"An empty shell of a spacecraft arrived to Kennedy Space Center two years ago, and now we have a fully assembled Orion standing 72 feet tall," said Michael Hawes Lockheed Martin Orion program manager. "We're ready to launch it into space and test every inch."</p>

A jump, hop, and a rocket ride away lies Earth's blushing sister: Mars. While apparently lifeless today, some 4 billion years ago, Mars featured rivers, oceans, and potentially even microbial life. The good times obviously didn't last. On Earth, we fear asteroid impacts as harbingers of destruction, but to early Mars, they were cascading gifts of life. The energy and gas they provided helped keep the planet hot and wet. But as the solar system settled down after its turbulent birth, those impacts grew to be few and far between. At the same time, Mars' core was cooling, quieting the...

The first sign of failure during Tuesday’s doomed launch of an Orbital Sciences Corp. Antares rocket from Virginia came from the booster’s first stage about 15 seconds after liftoff, according to engineers studying what triggered a fiery mishap that destroyed a commercial cargo craft heading to the International Space Station. The rocket’s 13-foot-diameter first stage, containing tanks with more than 50,000 gallons of kerosene and liquid oxygen propellants, is made in Ukraine and powered by Soviet-era engines built in the 1970s for Russia’s moon program. “Evidence suggests the failure initiated in the first stage after which the vehicle lost its...