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It sounds like science fiction, but it's eminently possible, researchers say: Robotic spacecraft could get to Mars after a journey of just three days. The key to making this happen is photon propulsion, which would use a powerful laser to accelerate spacecraft to relativistic speeds, said Philip Lubin, a physics professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. "There are recent advances which take this from science fiction to science reality," Lubin said at the 2015 NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) fall symposium last October. "There's no known reason why we cannot do this." Lubin and his team were awarded...

Figure 9 from “A Roadmap to Interstellar Flight”Guest essay by Eric WorrallAn American scientist has made a remarkable conceptual breakthrough, a design for a non nuclear relativistic launcher, capable of accelerating thousands of deep space probes per year to 0.25C; fast enough to reach the nearest stars in 15 years. The system is extremely scalable – you could start with a small, low cost proof of concept launcher, and work up to bigger devices, capable of launching substantial probes into interstellar space. The system also has a practical alternative use – the full size version is powerful enough to deflect...

Stephen Hawking is backing a project to send tiny spacecraft to another star system within a generation. They would travel trillions of miles; far further than any previous craft. A $100m (£70m) research programme to develop the computer chip-sized "starships" was launched by the billionaire Yuri Milner, supported by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Interstellar travel has long been a dream for many, but significant technological hurdles remain. But Prof Hawking told BBC News that fantasy could be realised sooner than we might think. Media captionThe spacecraft would be propelled from earth by a giant laser, as Pallab Ghosh reports "If...

NASA Begins Testing of Revolutionary E-Sail Technology NASA engineers are conducting tests to develop models for the Heliopause Electrostatic Rapid Transport System (HERTS) concept. HERTS builds upon the electric sail invention of Dr. Pekka Janhunen of the Finnish Meteorological Institute. An electric sail could potentially send scientific payloads to the edge of our solar system, the heliopause, in less than 10 years. The research is led by Bruce M. Wiegmann, an engineer in the Advanced Concepts Office at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. The HERTS E-Sail concept development and testing is funded by NASA's Space Technology...

Beginning today, all Earth imagery from a prolific Japanese remote sensing instrument operating aboard NASA's Terra spacecraft since late 1999 is now available to users everywhere at no cost. The public will have unlimited access to the complete 16-plus-year database for Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) instrument, which images Earth to map and monitor the changing surface of our planet. ASTER's database currently consists of more than 2.95 million individual scenes. The content ranges from massive scars across the Oklahoma landscape from an EF-5 tornado and the devastating aftermath...

Contrary to recent reports, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft is not experiencing unexplained deviations in its orbit around Saturn, according to mission managers and orbit determination experts at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Several recent news stories have reported that a mysterious anomaly in Cassini’s orbit could potentially be explained by the gravitational tug of a theorized massive new planet in our solar system, lurking far beyond the orbit of Neptune.

Kepler spacecraft is in emergency mode, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) said in a statement. Charlie Sobeck, Kepler and K2 mission manager at NASA's Ames Research Center announced that after a scheduled contact with mission operations engineers last April 7, it was discovered that Kepler is presently in emergency mode (EM), the spacecraft's lowest operational mode. The team is working on recovering from EM, as it consumes significant amount of fuel. Since the spacecraft is 75 million miles away from Earth, even with the speed of light, communication takes about 13 minutes for the message to travel from the...

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Remember when Blue Origin made history by vertically landing a rocket after launching it into space? Remember when they reused that same rocket and then landed it again? Well, today Jeff Bezos’ rocket company, once again, launched that very same New Shepard rocket and successfully landed it for a third time. At 11:28 AM EST, Bezos announced the successful landing of the New Shepard suborbital rocket as well as the crew capsule that it was carrying into space. While the rocket will eventually be used for crewed missions, there were no humans on this flight. Unlike previous launches where the...

In the movie, "The Martian," Matt Damon was a fictional astronaut stranded on Mars. In reality, the head of NASA says astronauts could set foot on the Red Planet within the next twenty years. "We think we're on the right trajectory to get humans to Mars in the 2030's," NASA Administrator Charles Bolden told CNBC's "On the Money" in an interview this week. He should know: Prior to assuming NASA's top job in 2009, Bolden was himself an astronaut for 14 years, commanding two space shuttle missions during that time. The U.S.'s top space official says he's confident the agency's...

After so many years of NASA not putting new manned missions into space, finally some good news for all of us space fans!

Establishing a human settlement on Mars has been the fevered dream of space agencies for some time. Long before NASA announced its “Journey to Mars” – a plan that outlined the steps that need to be taken to mount a manned mission by the 2030s – the agency’s was planning how a crewed mission could lead to the establishing of stations on the planet’s surface. And it seems that in the coming decades, this could finally become a reality. But when it comes to establishing a permanent colony – another point of interest when it comes to Mars missions –...

On Saturday, Japan lost contact with its newest space telescope, called Hitomi or ASTRO-H. The telescope, which includes an instrument from NASA, was intended to study the high-energy universe in X-rays and gamma rays, and observe such objects as supermassive black holes and galaxy clusters. Radar observations Sunday indicated that Hitomi, which launched on February 17, is in at least five pieces—and a plot of its orbit revealed a dramatic change on March 26, the date JAXA lost contact with the spacecraft. That means, says astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell, that some kind of “energetic event” has occurred—something more than a simple...

For about 60 million years during the Eocene epoch, the Indian subcontinent was a huge island. Having broken off from the ancient continent of Gondwanaland, the Indian Tectonic Plate drifted toward Eurasia. During that gradual voyage, the subcontinent saw a blossoming of exceptional wildlife, and when the trove of unique biodiversity finally made contact with bigger Eurasia, the exchange of animals and plants between these areas laid the foundations for countless modern species. "Today, mainland Asia and India have all this unique biodiversity -- but did the mainland Asian biodiversity come from India, or did the Indian biodiversity come from...

The defunct underwater wing of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) is set for a revival with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the government keen to establish the scientific veracity of Dwarka, the mythological submerged capital of Lord Krishna's kingdom, and the Rama Setu, a set of limestone shoals believed to date back to the Ramayana... "The National Institute of Oceanography has the expertise. They will be training our fleet of young divers," said Dr RS Fonia, ASI joint director general. The ministry of culture, the nodal ministry for ASI, is also looking at options to bring on board...

Until proven, a myth: Historians CHARU SUDAN KASTURI & SUDESHNA BANERJEE New Delhi/Calcutta, Sept. 12: Ram cannot be considered a historical figure despite references in ancient literature because crucial material evidence to authenticate his existence has not been found, historians have said. “A textual reference necessarily needs to be corroborated by inscriptions engraved in stone or other long-lasting material or by archaeological evidence,” said Nayanjot Lahiri, professor of ancient history at Delhi University. Until such evidence is found, a character or event in texts or literature is considered mythological, historians said. Historians have traced the original texts of the Mahabharata...

Thousands of furious Hindus took to the streets after the Indian Government claimed that the epic that forms the cornerstone of their religious beliefs was a work of fiction. Police used teargas to disperse crowds in the central state of Madhya Pradesh, where protesters accused the Government of blasphemy. The row erupted when the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), an arm of the Culture Ministry, told the country’s highest court that there was no evidence to support the existence of the characters in the Ramayana, a revered ancient text. Nor was there any historical record that Lord Ram, one of...

The popularization of scuba diving after World War II had its impact on Sri Lanka, when Sir Arthur Clarke and Mike Wilson (later Swami Siva Kalki) came here after their successful expedition on the Great Barrier Reef. They came here to write on the 'Reefs of Taprobane' (Sri Lanka ). Here they were joined by Jonklass. Although spear-fishing and coral reef exploration were the scuba divers' primary aims, searching for wrecks soon became their past time in a sea strewn with ship wrecks. It was Sir Arthur Clarke's book which first carried colour photographs of off-shore shipwrecks and the ruins...

World Monuments Fund favours garnering public support on this ancient bridge Government can make it a tourist attraction, say experts World Monuments Fund, an international preservation organisation that brings out World Monuments Watch List of endangered sites, has said that the Government of India should be made to realise that it's more valuable to preserve Ram Setu or Adam's Bridge than demolishing it. Marilyn Perry, chairman of the fund, said in an interview on the sidelines of the function to release the list of endangered sites of the world in its New York Madison Avenue office that the Federal Government...