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An omnibus spending bill passed by Congress this month directs NASA to accelerate work on a habitation module that could be used for future deep space missions, although how NASA will implement that direction is unclear. ... "NASA shall develop a prototype deep space habitation module within the advanced exploration systems program no later than 2018," ... Over the last several months, NASA has increasingly emphasized development of a habitation module that could be tested in cislunar space in the 2020s. That module could then be used for human missions to Mars that NASA hopes to carry out some time...

With the production of 50 grams of plutonium-238, researchers at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory have restored a U.S. capability dormant for nearly 30 years and set the course to provide power for NASA and other missions. ... Researchers will analyze the sample for chemical purity and plutonium-238 content, then verify production efficiency models and determine whether adjustments need to be made before scaling up the process. ... There are currently only 35 kilograms, or about 77 pounds, of plutonium-238 set aside for NASA missions, and only about half of this supply meets power specifications. This is...

space agency planned to launch a new Mars lander called InSight in March from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. InSight, short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations Geodesy and Heat Transport, was expected to arrive at Mars in September to take measurements of the red planet's interior and its atmosphere and to take color images. Instead, it's being sent back to its maker - Lockheed Martin - in Denver, Colorado. The faulty instrument is a very sensitive seismometer designed to measure movements in the Martian soil as small as the diameter of an atom, NASA said in a statement....

The new views of Enceladus are from the Cassini spacecraft's final close flyby of that moon on Dec. 19, from 4,999 kilometres. They include views of both older, cratered terrain, and younger, furrowed areas of the surface. During previous flybys, Cassini has come as close as within 50 kilometres of the surface, diving through the icy geysers spewing from the moon's surface from what is thought to be a liquid ocean underneath ... While Cassini has left Enceladus, NASA's Dawn spacecraft is just beginning to get more intimate with the dwarf planet Ceres. You may feel as if you're soaring...

NASA is calling off its next mission to Mars because there isn't enough time to fix a leaky seal on a key science instrument. The InSight spacecraft was set for launch in March. The problem is with a protective pouch around the lander's seismometer, which was designed to measure ground movement on the red planet. NASA managers and French designers of the instrument said Tuesday they must now decide whether the pouch's vacuum seal needs to be repaired, redesigned or the mission scrapped. ...

BURNING fossil fuels and cutting down trees causes global COOLING, a shock new NASA study has found.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket blasted off from Florida on Monday with a payload of communications satellites before the reusable main-stage booster turned around, soared back to Cape Canaveral and landed safely near its launch pad in a dramatic spaceflight first. The successful mission, capped by delivery of all 11 satellites to orbit for launch customer ORBCOMM Inc (ORBC.O), unfolded in just over 30 minutes and marked a pivotal reversal of fortunes for privately owned Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, founded by high-tech entrepreneur Elon Musk.

BURNING fossil fuels and cutting down trees causes global COOLING, a shock new NASA study has found. Major theories about what causes temperatures to rise have been thrown into doubt after NASA found the Earth has cooled in areas of heavy industrialization where more trees have been lost and more fossil fuel burning takes place. Environmentalists have long argued the burning of fossil fuels in power stations and for other uses is responsible for global warming and predicted temperature increases because of the high levels of carbon dioxide produced - which causes the global greenhouse effect. While the findings did...

The UN Climate Change conference is wrapped up yesterday. After two weeks of world leaders opining mindlessly, protesters heckling speakers, and participants enjoying lavish French cuisine, bureaucrats agreed to squander billions of dollars to solve a non-existent problem...[Break]... The accord is so preposterous that even the "godfather of climate science", former NASA scientist James Hansen is ripping the deal apart before the ink is dry: "It's a fraud really, a fake," he says, rubbing his head. "It's just bullshit for them to say: 'We'll have a 2C warming target and then try to do a little better every five years.'...

The Orbital ATK Cygnus CRS-4 resupply vessel arrived in the vicinity of the massive orbiting outpost around 530 a.m. EST today with pinpoint accuracy after precisely firing its maneuvering thrusters to home in on the complex during a two day orbital chase. After moving close in to the station, NASA astronaut Kjell Lindgren deftly grappled the Cygnus - named the "S.S. Deke Slayton II" - with the space station 57-foot-long robotic arm, Canadarm2, at 6:19 a.m. EST, while operating the arm from a robotics work station inside the seven windowed domed cupola. The entire sequence was broadcast live on NASA...

The actual problem that computer scientists threw at the D-Wave Two is pretty esoteric. To oversimplify it, they asked the machine to pick the optimum choice out of a large jumble of information with nearly 1,000 variables. Such optimization problems, which involve weighing multiple choices against each other, should be far, far easier for quantum computers to crunch. That's because the basis of quantum computation, the qubit, uses the odd physics of quantum mechanic to hold information as a zero, one, or a superposition of both. Again, to over-simplify things, this allows quantum computers to consider a vast number of...

Two years ago Google and NASA bought a D-Wave 2X quantum computing system and the Chocolate Factory has now pronounced itself very pleased with the results. "We found that for problem instances involving nearly 1000 binary variables, quantum annealing significantly outperforms its classical counterpart, simulated annealing. It is more than 108 times faster than simulated annealing running on a single core," Hartmut Neven, Google's director of engineering reported on Tuesday. Now comparing almost any operation against a single core is a bit of a fudge, but the results show that Google and NASA certainly feel D-Wave's take on quantum computing...

Flashing some interplanetary gold bling and sipping "space water" might sound far-fetched, but both could soon be reality, thanks to a new US law that legalizes cosmic mining.In a first, President Barack Obama signed legislation at the end of November that allows commercial extraction of minerals and other materials, including water, from asteroids and the moon. That could kick off an extraterrestrial gold rush, backed by a private aeronautics industry that is growing quickly and cutting the price of commercial space flight. The US Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act of 2015 says that any materials American individuals or companies find...

NASA has been part of the International Space Station for the last 15 years, but now it's slowly spreading its wings, making it known that it is letting go of the facility to pursue its goals of flying beyond low-Earth orbit. In an advisory council meeting early December, William Gerstenmaier, NASA human spaceflight chief, said that the agency is making the move to get out of the ISS as quickly as possible, regardless of whether or not its absence is filled by the private sector. This statement is striking because while NASA is clear about its desire to see commercial...

Black and white images beamed to Earth could be some of the clearest close-ups of Pluto's surface humans see for decades, NASA says. The images, taken by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, show craters, mountains and glacial terrain along a strip 50 miles (80 kilometers) wide. The spacecraft took them in July during its closest flyby of Pluto - which is at a distance from Earth that varies from 4.67 billion miles (7.5 billion kilometers) to 2.66 billion miles (4.28 billion kilometers) - and they were among the most recent batch sent to back to our planet.

NASA is looking to get back on track with the first U.S. delivery to the International Space Station in nearly eight months. An unmanned Atlas rocket is scheduled to blast off at 5:55 p.m. Thursday from Cape Canaveral, Florida, with 7,400 pounds of supplies. But clouds and rain could push the launch into Friday, when the weather worsens.

Russia Is Planning To Build A Permanent Manned Base On The Moon Plans are being finalised Rob WaughRob Waugh – 10 hours ago Russia’s space agency is planning to build a manned moon base - launching modules into space on six separate rockets. Russia plans to launch a lunar probe in 2024 which will scout possible locations - before landing a man on the moon in 2030. Construction of the Luna 25 lander has already begun, the official state news agency Tass has reported. Once the components are in place, assembly of the moon base will continue over ten years....

AOL (12/2) reports that as the Paris climate talks take place, a satellite image released by NASA, illustrates the view of Chinese smog from space. In reference to the image, NASA said, “The brightest areas are clouds or fog, which have tinges of gray or yellow because of the air pollution,” adding, “Other cloud-free areas have a pall of gray haze that mostly blots out the cities below.”

Remember when Al Gore predicted the global ice caps would all be melted by 2014? Well, it may be an "inconvenient truth" for Al to accept the fact that 2014 has come and gone and, yes, we do still have ice caps at earth's poles. In reality, what we are now seeing completely contradicts the whole "Climate Change/Global Warming" hoax President Obama is peddling at the Paris climate summit right now. NASA.gov is actually reporting data from Antarctica that blows a huge hole in both Gore's and Obama's pet scare tactic:... According to the new analysis of satellite data, the...

A German scientist has accused the National Aeronautics and Space Agency's (NASA) Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS) of altering temperature records between 2010 and 2012 to produce the illusion that the Earth has been warming since 1950. GISS datasets are used by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to document global warming. In a presentation at the 2012 EIKE Climate Conference in Germany, Professor Friedrich-Karl Ewert, a retired geologist and data expert from the University of Paderborn, said that he examined publicly available archived temperature records from 1,153 weather stations around the globe going back to 1881...