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A scheme to make the shallow strait between India and Sri Lanka navigable has upset environmentalists and the port of Colombo. To its supporters, it is a dream project, no less than the “Suez of the east”; to its opponents it is an environmental catastrophe. Either way, plans to dredge a channel in the seabed between India and Sri Lanka will be controversial, and could alter maritime and military operations in the Indian Ocean. The $400m project, called the Sethusamudram Ship Canal, involves digging a 152km, 300m-wide channel through the Palk Strait, a shallow stretch of sea separating the south...

NEW DELHI: After Nasa, it's the turn of Indian experts to declare that there is no evidence linking the mythical Lanka bridge built by Hanuman to the chain of sandbanks captured by the US space agency's cameras across the Palk Strait. Eminent astrophysicist J V Narlikar, when contacted in Pune, said he had seen reports claiming about the mythical bridge, but there was no evidence to suggest that what had been located had links with the bridge mentioned in the Ramayana. "There is no archaeological or literary evidence to support this claim," eminent historian R S Sharma told The Times...

The travel time from Earth to Mars using current space flight technologies is estimated to be 9 months. Last week, an innovative concept was proposed which claims to reduce the time that will be spent for Mars travel to merely three days through so-called photonic propulsion technology. But a new proposal threatens to radically shorten this period to an astounding 30 minutes. The idea was revealed by Phillip Lubin, who is a physics professor at the University of California Santa Barbara. Lubin was also responsible for the photonic propulsion technology proposal. This time, however, he identified the use of high-powered...

Bob Ebeling, a Challenger engineer who predicted the space shuttle would explode, never truly forgave himself for the deaths of the seven crew. After three decades of guilt over the disaster, he passed away on Monday aged 89 in Brigham City, Utah, following a long illness. The former engineer for NASA contractor Morton Thiokol was part of a team of four that tried to warn the space agency against the launch, saying the temperatures in Cape Canaveral were too cold for the booster rockets to seal properly.

NASA’s budget proposal is far more concerned with spending on global warming research than supporting the agency’s mission of space exploration, according to Republican lawmakers. “This budget takes our human spaceflight program nowhere fast. This budget undermines our space program and diverts critical funding to lower priority items,” Texas Republican Rep. Brian Babin, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Space, said during the hearing. “Orion and [the Space Launch System] are strategic national assets and must be sufficiently funded. Proposed cuts to the planetary science division are equally disturbing.” Democratic lawmakers, however, argued spending more climate science to be a...

This interactive Google map shows the path of the Total Solar Eclipse of 2017 Aug 21. The northern and southern path limits are blue and the central line is red. You MUST be somewhere within the central path (between the blue lines) to see the total phase of the eclipse. The eclipse is longest on the central line (red). The yellow lines crossing the path indicate the time and position of maximum eclipse at 10-minute intervals. The green marker labeled GE is the point of Greatest Eclipse. The magenta marker labeled GD is the point of Greatest Duration. This is...

On Monday, NASA revealed a project as part of its newly-introduced New Aviation Horizons initiative that awarded Lockheed Martin a $20 million contract over the next 17 months to create a jet that uses quiet supersonic technology (QueSST). It is the first in a series of ‘X-planes’ for the initiative. NASA said it conducted studies across the country to learn more about acceptable sound levels. The finished product will fly at supersonic speeds, and create a "heartbeat" in place of the disruptive "boom" that is currently associated with supersonic flight.

NASA astronaut Scott Kelly is on his way back to Earth. Kelly has completed a nearly yearlong mission on the International Space Station, the longest any U.S. astronaut has been in space. He’s set to come home on Tuesday, riding back to Earth on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. The spacecraft undocked from the station shortly after 8 p.m. ET. Undocking complete at 8:02pm ET! @StationCDRKelly is on his way home from a #YearInSpace pic.twitter.com/qaPqva0jsU — NASA (@NASA) March 2, 2016 Kelly is scheduled to land in the Kazakhstan desert at 10:27 Wednesday morning (11:27 p.m. ET Tuesday).

SpaceX aborted the launch of a commercial communications satellite less than a second before liftoff this evening (Feb. 28), delaying the mission yet again. SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket was scheduled to launch the SES-9 satellite from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida at 6:46 p.m. EST (2346 GMT) today, but that initial liftoff time was pushed back 35 minutes because a boat wandered into the mission's "keep-out zone," launch controllers said. At 7:21 p.m. EST (0021 GMT on Monday, Feb. 29), the Falcon 9's engines began firing up, but they shut down just as the countdown clock was reaching...

The Praise and Worship Club at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, has been told that it cannot use the word "Jesus" in meeting announcements placed in the JSC Today email newsletter, because it violates the Establishment Clause of the Constitution's First Amendment. The warning given to the club by the JSC Today legal team in May 2015 has recently picked up national attention, with the Liberty Institute attorneys sending a demand letter to NASA threatening a lawsuit on Feb. 8 and the CitizenGo website launching a petition drive on Feb....

For the second time this presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton is claiming a federal agency rejected her inquiries to serve because she was a woman. Clinton, appearing Tuesday on the Steve Harvey Show, said growing up, she wanted to be an astronaut. “I was excited about the space program. I was excited about President Kennedy saying we were gonna send a man to the moon and bring him back within the decade. I thought it was really incredible we were gonna do that,” she told Harvey. “So, yes, I wrote to NASA,” she said. “Really…” Harvey replied. “I wrote to NASA,...

Apparently things really are spooky on the dark side of the moon. Apollo astronauts who orbited the moon two months before Neil Armstrong's famous 1969 landing heard mysterious and unexplainable 'music' on its far side, out of the range of Earthly radio transmissions, it has emerged.Recently unearthed recordings made by NASA of the journey, which took the Apollo 10 capsule around the far side of the moon, show the astronauts reacting with surprise and confusion to an unearthly howling noise in their headsets. – Daily Mail Interesting, unless you fall in the group of conspiracy theorists who think the  whole...

The crew of an Apollo mission to the moon were so startled when they encountered strange music-like radio transmissions coming through their headsets, they didn't know whether or not to report it to NASA, it's been revealed. It was 1969, two months before Apollo 11's historic first manned landing on the moon, when Apollo 10 entered lunar orbit, which included traversing the far side of the moon when all spacecraft are out of radio contact with Earth for about an hour and nobody on Earth can see or hear them. As far as the public knew, everything about the mission...

In one of his final interviews from the International Space Station, astronaut Scott Kelly said that the Earth's atmosphere "looks very, very fragile" and "like something that we need to take care of."

NASA's next cargo run to the International Space Station will be delayed for at least two weeks after black mold was found in two fabric bags used for packing clothing, food and other supplies, the U.S. space agency said on Wednesday. The source of the mold, a common fungal growth in humid climates like Florida's, is under investigation by NASA and Lockheed Martin, which prepares NASA cargo for launch aboard two commercial carriers, Orbital ATK and privately owned SpaceX. An Orbital Cygnus cargo ship was more than halfway packed for the launch, scheduled for March 10, when the mold was...

The Times of India reports that the meteorite's blast left a crater 5 feet deep and 2 feet wide. Police recovered a black, pockmarked stone weighing 0.39 ounces, it said. However, NASA scientists in the U.S. said in a public statement that photos of the site were more consistent with "a land based explosion," The New York Times reports. In an email to The New York Times, NASA's Planetary Defense Officer Lindley Johnson explained that death by meteorite impact is so rare that one has never been confirmed in recorded history. "There have been reports of injuries, but even those...

The Obama Administration has put forth its FY 2017 NASA budget proposal, according to GeekWire. The overall spending level is $19 billion, an almost $300 million cut from the current fiscal year. Much of the money comes out of the development for the Orion deep space vehicle and the heavy lift Space Launch System, the very basis of the space agency’s plans for exploring deep space beyond low Earth orbit.

The name of Jesus is not welcome in the Johnson Space Center newsletter, according to a complaint filed on behalf of a group of Christians who work for NASA. The JSC Praise & Worship Club was directed by NASA attorneys to refrain from using the name 'Jesus' in club announcements that appeared in a Space Center newsletter. "It was shocking to all of us and very frustrating," NASA engineer Sophia Smith told me. "NASA has a long history of respecting religious speech. Why wouldn't they allow us to put the name Jesus in the announcement about our club?" Liberty Institute,...

The hunt for signs of life on Mars has been on for decades, and so far scientists have found only barren dirt and rocks. Now a pair of astronomers thinks that strangely shaped minerals inside a Martian crater could be the clue everyone has been waiting for. In 2008, scientists announced that NASA's Spirit rover had discovered deposits of a mineral called opaline silica inside Mars's Gusev crater. That on its own is not as noteworthy as the silica's shape: Its outer layers are covered in tiny nodules that look like heads of cauliflower sprouting from the red dirt. No...

Apollo 14 Mission To Fra Mauro (1971) [documentary] Courtesy: NASA/JSC