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The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has received the highest ranking of any large government agency on the Partnership for Public Service’s “Best Places to Work in the Federal Government” rankings. NASA received a 78.6 index score in 2016, which is up 2.5 from last year. “The index score is not a combined average of an agency’s category scores. It is calculated using a proprietary weighted formula that looks at responses to three different questions in the U.S. Office of Personnel Management’s Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey. The more the question predicts intent to remain, the higher the weighting,” the...

A bag used to collect lunar samples during the first manned mission to the moon legally belongs to an Illinois woman who bought it for $995 when it was mistakenly sold during a government auction, a judge ruled Wednesday. Judge J. Thomas Marten, of the U.S. District Court in Wichita, said he doesn't have the authority to reverse the sale of the bag used during the Apollo 11 moon mission in July 1969, even though it shouldn't have gone up for auction. The white bag, which has lunar material embedded in its fabric and which the government considers "a rare...

NASA says it’s troubleshooting a snag on the Mars rover Curiosity that’s preventing it from moving its robotic arm and driving to another spot. The space agency said Tuesday the problem involves a motor in the rover’s drill that is used to bore into rocks. Curiosity has been taking pictures, but doing little else for the past two weeks.

Orbital ATK (NYSE: OA), a global leader in aerospace and defense technologies, announced it is prepared to launch the company’s air-launched Pegasus rocket aboard its Stargazer L-1011 airplane from Cape Canaveral on Monday, December 12 at approximately 8:24 a.m. EST. Pegasus will be carrying NASA’s Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System (CYGNSS) to study the inner core of tropical cyclones. The data provided will help scientists and meteorologists better understand and predict the path of a hurricane.

Opioid deaths continued to surge in 2015, surpassing 30,000 for the first time in recent history, according to CDC data released Thursday. That marks an increase of nearly 5,000 deaths from 2014. Deaths involving powerful synthetic opiates, like fentanyl, rose by nearly 75 percent from 2014 to 2015.

The transition team for U.S. President-elect Donald Trump added six more people to the NASA landing team Friday, including senior Dynetics executive Steve Cook and former astronaut Sandy Magnus. [...] Other members: Greg Autry of the University of Southern California Jack Burns of the University of Colorado Rodney Liesveld, a former senior policy adviser at NASA Jeff Waksman, a former research fellow at the U.S. House of Representatives The NASA landing team is lead by Chris Shank, who worked for House Science Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) until last week.

What wonderful news -- investing in actual science and divesting from leftwing lunacy. Some of man's greatest achievements and scientific discoveries came from space exploration. Obama changed NASA's mission from space exploration to Muslim outreach. NASA's Administrator explained that Obama had asked him to "find ways to reach out to dominantly Muslim countries." (More here: Obama 's stone age) TRUMP TO SEND MEN BACK TO THE MOON AND 'EXPLORE ENTIRE SOLAR SYSTEM' RATHER THAN FIGHT CLIMATE CHANGE The president elect could put men on the moon once again – and use money from the climate change budget to do it...

Plans to restore the NASA mission control room that served as the nerve center when man first reached the moon have been discussed for more than 20 years, but its restoration and preservation remain in limbo. Officials at Johnson Space Center in Houston say the restoration of Mission Operation Control Room 2 is a priority, but note that NASA has other priorities too. …

The debate on Man-made Climate Change, aka Anthropogenic Global Warming, has been raging for a couple decades now. The establishment media has told us repeatedly in recent years that there is consensus among 97% of climate scientists that global warming is real, and that it is caused by human activity. For many people, this appeal to authority has been convincing, and they lash out at any opposition calling them ‘climate-deniers’ or worse. Recent data has emerged that casts major doubt on the general consensus. So how could 97% of the world’s climate experts get something like this wrong? Most people...

In the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick’s spacecraft spins through the solar system like a giant, futuristic ferris wheel. The rotating craft has a suitably epic quality and, through the centripetal force, conveniently explains why there appears to be gravity inside the spaceship. In real life future astronauts may have to settle for a slightly less cinematic form of artificial gravity, however. Space scientists working on the problem have developed a large vacuum cleaner-like device that seals around the astronaut’s waist, creating the impression of weight on the lower body through a powerful suction force. Alan Hargens, an...

Astronauts will be traveling inside NASA's Orion spacecraft. Since they won't be able to receive additional cargo deliveries or dispose of trash, they'll have to take only what they can carry. That means a calorie-laden breakfast bar may be the perfect choice for saving room. "When you have 700 to 900 calories of something, it's going to have some mass regardless of what shape it's in, so we've taken a look at how to get some mass savings by reducing how we're packaging and stowing what the crew would eat for breakfast for early Orion flights with crew," Jessica Vos,...

Make no mistake and don’t be fooled by her rhetoric, Garver is a committed liberal who will bring NASA towards cronyism and liberal policies. “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” was the phrase that defined a historic event—a global, scientific breakthrough which defined American ingenuity and exceptionalism. A generation of innovators, explorers, and scientists were inspired by this new world which had opened because of the ingenuity and talent responsible for completing NASA’s core mission: deep space exploration, aeronautics and science. However, deep space exploration of this new world has not been fully funded by the...

Donald Trump is poised to eliminate all climate change research conducted by Nasa as part of a crackdown on “politicized science”, his senior adviser on issues relating to the space agency has said. Nasa’s Earth science division is set to be stripped of funding in favor of exploration of deep space, with the president-elect having set a goal during the campaign to explore the entire solar system by the end of the century. Related: 2016 locked into being hottest year on record, Nasa says This would mean the elimination of Nasa’s world-renowned research into temperature, ice, clouds and other climate...

NASA’s top climate scientist Gavin Schmidt has warned President-Elect Donald Trump that the planet just won’t stand for having a fully-fledged climate denier in the White House. Good luck with that one, Gavin. Or “Toast” as we’ll shortly be calling you… Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), told the Independent: “The point is simple: the climate is changing and you can try to deny it, you can appoint people who don’t care about it into positions of power, but regardless nature has the last vote on this.” Unfortunately, Schmidt doesn’t feel so strongly on the issue...

Trump 'will use Nasa climate change cash to fund Moon missions' as part of his bid to 'Make America Great Again' Donald Trump may use climate change research cash to blast astronauts back to the Moon as part of his mission to ‘Make America Great Again’. Members of the US space community believe Mr Trump’s presidential victory could lead to the resurrection of space agency Nasa’s lunar programme, which has not put a man on the Moon since 1972. The huge cost of lunar missions has been the main reason for their demise, blocked either by presidents or Congress. However,...

Whitson will be celebrating her 57th birthday aboard the ISS in February 2017. On completion of her 179-day stint aboard the ISS, she will rewrite several space record books. She is already the oldest woman to orbit the earth. She will hold the record as the woman with the most time in space. She will also become the American astronaut with the most time in space, 556 days, beating the existing record, 534 days, of astronaut Jeff Williams. Among the other crew members, the 45-year-old Novitskiy is on his second flight into space, having already spent 144 days on an...

Despite criticism from the media about his stance on space policy, President-elect Trump is set to focus NASA mainly on space exploration following his inauguration in January, revealing his interest to “free NASA” from logistics so that they can focus on “space exploration” in a speech last month. “Over the last 8 years, the Obama-Clinton administration has undermined our space program tremendously. That will change,” proclaimed Trump. “So many good things come out of it, including great jobs. That will change very quickly under a Trump administration and it’ll change before it’s too late.”

The results of NASA's tests on the 'impossible' EM Drive have been leaked, and they reveal that the controversial propulsion system really does work, and is capable of generating impressive thrust in a vacuum, even after error measurements have been accounted for. The EM Drive has made headlines over the past year, because it offers the incredible possibility of a fuel-free propulsion system that could potentially get us to Mars in just 70 days. But there's one major problem: according to the current laws of physics, it shouldn't work. The issue is the fact that the EM Drive defies Newton's...

http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate3004.htmlNASA: Carbon Dioxide Fertilization Greening Earth, Study Finds April 26, 2016 From a quarter to half of Earth’s vegetated lands has shown significant greening over the last 35 years largely due to rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change on April 25. An international team of 32 authors from 24 institutions in eight countries led the effort, which involved using satellite data from NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer instruments to help determine the leaf area index, or...

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2016 October 19 M45: The Pleiades Star Cluster Image Credit & Copyright: Hermann von Eiff Explanation: Have you ever seen the Pleiades star cluster? Even if you have, you probably have never seen it as dusty as this. Perhaps the most famous star cluster on the sky, the bright stars of the Pleiades can be seen without binoculars even from the heart of a light-polluted city. With a...