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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — NASA is weighing the risk of adding astronauts to the first flight of its new megarocket, designed to eventually send crews to Mars. The space agency's human exploration chief said Friday that his boss and the Trump administration asked for the feasibility study. The objective is to see what it would take to speed up a manned mission; under the current plan, astronauts wouldn't climb aboard until 2021— at best. The Space Launch System, known as SLS, will be the most powerful rocket when it flies.

The discovery of seven habitable planets just 40 light years away is certainly impressive, but the fact is, they are still 40 light years away. Unless we're willing and able to spend thousands of years traveling through space, we won't be rolling into the TRAPPIST-1 system anytime soon. This means that over the coming decades, advanced scientific instruments closer to home will play very important roles in exploring these distant worlds – perhaps none more so than the James Webb Space Telescope. So what can we expect when it is fired into orbit next year? We checked in with some...

I do hope that Gavin “Toast” Schmidt, the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS), followed the advice I gave him a few months back. Because it now looks very much as if he and many of his colleagues are about to face exciting new job opportunities, hopefully in areas best suited to their talents, such as the challenging world of fast-food retail. Yes, as we predicted, NASA is going to be stripped of the two main roles it enjoyed under the Obama administration – Muslim outreach and green propaganda – and return to its original day (and...

The U.S. Senate passed legislation recently cutting funding for NASA’s global warming research. The House is expected to pass the bill, and President Trump will likely sign it. Supporters say it “re-balances” NASA’s budget back toward space exploration and away from global warming and earth science research. Republicans plan to end the more than $2 billion NASA spends on its Earth Science Mission Directorate. “By rebalancing, I’d like for more funds to go into space exploration; we’re not going to zero out earth sciences,” Texas Republican Rep. Lamar Smith, who chairs the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, told...

NASA made the decision to leave the Juno spacecraft, currently orbiting Jupiter, in its current orbit that cycles around the gas giant every 53 days. The choice hinges on worries surrounding Juno's main engine, which displayed some out-of-the-ordinary readings as the team was preparing to shorten the probe's orbit. “Juno is healthy, its science instruments are fully operational, and the data and images we’ve received are nothing short of amazing,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. “The decision to forego the burn is the right thing to do – preserving a valuable asset so...

According to current plans, a crewed mission, EM-2, would not be launched until several years later under the NASA timeline — certainly not during Trump's current term. That crewed mission would also orbit the moon. But on Wednesday, NASA's acting administrator, Robert Lightfoot, sent a letter to employees saying he'd instructed the top NASA official for human spaceflight, associate administrator William Gerstenmaier, to explore the feasibility of adding astronauts to the EM-1 flight.

An unusually high number of Medical and NASA scientist deaths in recent years. Alberto Behar helped prove that there had once been water on Mars. He worked on two missions to Mars and was also a robotics expert who researched how robots function in harsh environments (such as under water and inside volcanoes). The unusually high number of scientist deaths in recent years has made people question the suspicious nature of his death.

Stay away from Europa? No way. It’s just too fascinating a place with its jigsaw-puzzle ice sheets, crisscross valleys, miles of ice on top and a warm, salty ocean below. The movie was prescient — if you’re going to search for life elsewhere in the solar system, Europa’s one of the best candidates. While we’ve sent spacecraft to photograph and study the icy moon during orbital flybys, no lander has yet to touch the surface. That may change soon. In early 2016, in response to a congressional directive, NASA’s Planetary Science Division began a pre-Phase A study to assess the...

54 0 MORE Partner Series NASA's Juno spacecraft has flown by Jupiter for the fourth time. Juno skimmed about 2,670 miles (4,300 kilometers) above Jupiter's cloud tops at 7:57 a.m. EST (1257 GMT) this morning (Feb. 2), zooming by at 129,000 mph (208,000 km/h) relative to the giant planet, NASA officials said. All eight of Juno's science instruments were on and collecting data during the flyby if all went according to plan, they added. "Revelations include that Jupiter's magnetic fields and aurora are bigger and more powerful than originally thought and that the belts and zones that give the gas...

Space shuttle Challenger blew up 73 seconds after liftoff. All seven crewmen perished.

HONOLULU – A group of NASA-funded researchers are poised to enter an isolated geodesic dome on a remote Hawaii volcano to study human behavior in long-term space exploration, including a planned voyage to Mars. The six scientists enter their new home Thursday on the Big Island's Mauna Loa volcano for an eight-month stay. The team will have no physical contact with people in the outside world and will work with a 20-minute delay in communications, the time it would take for an email to reach Earth from Mars. The study will assess the psychological difficulties associated with living in isolated...

Three astronauts were killed in the blaze in Cape Canaveral on January 27, 1967  Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee were trapped in their burning craft  A small spark created a blaze that burned hotter than 1,000°F (537°C)

Moonwalkers and dozens of others who took part in NASA's storied Apollo program paid tribute Thursday to the three astronauts killed in a fire 50 years ago. On the eve of the Apollo 1 anniversary, hundreds gathered at Kennedy Space Center to honor Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee. They died during a countdown rehearsal at the launch pad, inside their burning spacecraft, on Jan. 27, 1967 On Friday, NASA is opening an Apollo 1 exhibit featuring the hatch that prevented the three astronauts from escaping. It has been concealed for the past half-century along with the capsule. The...

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., Jan. 17, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- The U.S. Air Force and Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT) will launch the next Space Based Infrared System (SBIRS) satellite on Jan. 19 aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket. The launch window is between 7:46 and 8:26 p.m. EST. SBIRS GEO Flight 3 was designed and built at Lockheed Martin in Sunnyvale, California, as the next in a series of Air Force satellites that provide multi-mission surveillance in the areas of missile warning, missile defense, technical intelligence and battlespace awareness. The data provided by SBIRS can also be applied to a...

New footage released by Nasa shows exactly what it looks like to land on an alien world. It may seem like stuff of science fiction, but the scenes in the new video happened in real life, 12 years ago. The stunning video was captured when the space agency’s Huygens probe descended onto the mysterious world of Titan, Saturn’s biggest moon.

THE American space agency is planning to send a spacecraft to a lump of metal in space worth quadrillions of dollars. The 200km-wide asteroid is currently orbiting the sun between Mars and Jupiter. It is made up of various precious metals such as iron, nickel and gold. Experts believe the iron alone in the rock would be worth $10,000 quadrillion – enough to cause the world’s economy, worth $73.7 trillion, to promptly collapse altogether.

Euguene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon, died Monday, Jan. 16, surrounded by his family. Photo gallery of Eugene Cernan Cernan, a Captain in the U.S. Navy, left his mark on the history of exploration by flying three times in space, twice to the moon. He also holds the distinction of being the second American to walk in space and the last human to leave his footprints on the lunar surface. He was one of 14 astronauts selected by NASA in October 1963. He piloted the Gemini 9 mission with Commander Thomas P. Stafford on a three-day...

Gene Cernan, an early NASA astronaut who was the last man to set foot on the moon, died Monday, NASA announced in a tweet. He was 82.

Has anyone seen Hidden Figures? Is it appropriate for a young girl? I have a 12 year old girl who is interested in math, astronomy, and NASA. I thought the movie might motivate her.

WASHINGTON — NASA's chief scientist is leaving the agency after more than three years on the job, as NASA refreshes the leadership of its science programs. Ellen Stofan left NASA this month after serving as chief scientist since August 2013. Agency spokesman Dwayne Brown was not immediately able to provide an exact departure date, or plans to select a new chief scientist. Stofan's departure was noted by NASA publicly only in an interview the agency posted on its Tumblr social media account Dec. 21. In the interview, NASA said Stofan was "departing for new adventures," but was not more specific....