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Every now and then a word just catches your ear, and several times in a day it jumps out at you and you’re tempted to say: “There it is again!”Yesterday it was the word “consider”, an ordinary, daily word. Or is it? Why did it strike me so? With my knowledge of Latin, it occurred to me that “consider” has something to do with the stars, for the Latin word sidera means “stars” or “heavenly bodies.” How interesting, I have use the word for the better part of 50 years and that had never crossed my mind. But as sometimes...

Breathtaking space pictures don't necessarily start snd end at APOD. There are countless astronomy sources that offer imagery of the Cosmos catalogued in different ways, like the National Optical Astronomy Obsevatory, NOAO. NOAO is the US national research & development center for ground-based night time astronomy. In particular, NOAO is enabling the development of the US optical-infrared (O/IR) System, an alliance of public and private observatories allied for excellence in scientific research, education and public outreach. Our core mission is to provide public access to qualified professional researchers via peer-review to forefront scientific capabilities on telescopes operated by NOAO as...

NASA will complete a $350 million structure to test rocket engines at Stennis Space Center in Mississippi early this year. Then, it plans to mothball the 300- foot-high, steel-frame tower for the foreseeable future. The reason: Congress ordered the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to finish building the facility even though the agency doesn't need it. The tower was designed to test a GenCorp Inc. engine for a rocket program canceled in 2010. Its funding survived thanks to Mississippi Republican senators led by Roger Wicker, who crafted a provision requiring the agency to complete the work. The test stand is...

...[A]n Orbital Sciences Corp. Antares rocket carrying a commercially developed cargo ship blasted off Thursday and climbed into orbit, kicking off the company's first operational flight to deliver supplies and equipment to the International Space Station.... The two-stage 130-foot-tall Antares rocket, equipped with modified first-stage engines left over from the Soviet moon program, roared to life at 1:07:05 p.m. EST (GMT-5) and quickly lifted off from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport, climbing away atop a torrent of fiery exhaust as Earth's rotation carried the pad into the plane of the space station's orbit. Accelerating smoothly as it consumed its first stage...

Religion and astronomy may not overlap often, but a new NASA X-ray image captures a celestial object that resembles the "Hand of God." The cosmic "hand of God" photo was produced when a star exploded and ejected an enormous cloud of material, which NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, glimpsed in high-energy X-rays, shown in blue in the photo. NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory had imaged the green and red parts previously, using lower-energy X-rays. "NuSTAR's unique viewpoint, in seeing the highest-energy X-rays, is showing us well-studied objects and regions in a whole new light," NuSTAR telescope principal investigator Fiona...

US President Barack Obama has promised to keep international space station’s laboratory in orbit, at least until 2024, which is a four-year extension, according to NASA officials. However, Obama’s decision was not a surprise since the million-pound laboratory, which took 13 years, over 100 rocket and shuttle launches and 160 spacewalks to construct, would take ISS six years to de-orbit, the Washington Post reported. William H. Gerstenmaier, the head of NASA’s human spaceflight program, said that Obama’s administration has given a tremendous gift to them that changes the way folks see their investment, especially the commercial side.

Golden Spike has detailed plans for a lunar return using existing assets. The recent successful Spacex flights are improving the viability of Golden Spike and its plans to return to the moon before 2020. Golden Spike estimates that they could repeat Apollo 11 for about $6.4 billion and make repeated manned trips to the moon for about $1.5 billion for each trip. Here are the budgets of different space agencies.

SpaceX engineers at Cape Canaveral are finishing up preparations to launch a Falcon 9 rocket with a communications satellite for Thailand on Monday, just over one month after the Falcon 9's last mission from Florida. Monday's launch window opens at 5:06 p.m. EST (2206 GMT) and extends more than two hours to 7:08 p.m. EST (0008 GMT), according to a SpaceX spokesperson and the U.S. Air Force. Deployment of the 6,649-pound Thaicom 6 satellite is expected 31 minutes after liftoff. The 224-foot-tall Falcon 9 rocket will be rolled to the launch pad and rotated vertical atop the launch mount at...

Sriharikota: The Indian Space Research Organisation or ISRO achieved another milestone today as it successfully launched the Geo-synchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle or GSLV-D5 from the space port at Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh. The advanced GSAT-14 communications satellite that GSLV-D5 is carrying has also been separated from the rocket and placed into orbit. The Rs. 350-crore mission marks India's entry into the multi-billion dollar commercial launcher market on a fully indigenous large rocket. An India-made cryogenic engine powers the GSLV-D5, which stands almost 50 meters tall (as high as a 17-storey building) and weighs a whopping 415 tons (as much 80...

Virgin Galactic space travel is aiming to revolutionize commercial air travel at its best, with the launching of the first ever space tourism flight next year, which took nine long years in the making. Although the space travel will be available to those who can afford the $250,000 ticket, the space travel company wants to bring this to the masses; it also aims to provide an ultimate passenger experience that no other air company has ever offered before. With the first ever commercial space travel flight on its way, the giant company aims to "push long-haul air travel above the...

The video below is a very creative representation of what the day and night sky on Earth would look like if the earth had rings like Saturn. It is well worth a view.But it puts me in the mind of pondering the delicate balance of life on this earth and, though the artwork in the video is beautiful, I suspect that the presence of rings would dramatically alter life on this earth, perhaps even annihilate it.By way of disclaimer, let me say I am not a geologist or astronomer. But a number of things concern me about the presence of...

About 10 years ago I wrote a history of the National Aerospace Plane Program, published by the USAF. It was restricted, expensive, and difficult to obtain. I guess the USAF decided to make it more available, releasing it in paperback. I just discovered it, but I've talked about this project with many of you:

The extreme challenges and conditions faced by rovers during missions to explore other planets has inspired researchers and engineers to look into alternative, more suitable designs. After considering the complicated choreography of a regular landing – as we saw with the Mars Curiosity rover in August last year – as well as the challenging terrain a rover often faces once it reaches a planet’s surface, engineers at NASA have come up with an ultra-flexible squishable robot designed to effortlessly cope with any planetary surface it finds itself on. Although the so-called Super Ball Bot has been in development for...

There used to be Americans up there. The thought came to me on a dark, predawn morning when I looked out the cold window at the bright and shining moon. The Chinese have landed. "We choose to go to the moon in this decade," President John F. Kennedy said in 1962 when he launched the Apollo moon program, "and do other things, not because they are easy, because they are hard." He called it "the greatest and most complex exploration in man's history." And so it was. What happened? We used to "own" the moon. What happened to the Americans?...

For all you Earth observation geeks out there, we have some good news — two Russian astronauts are going to install a camera on Friday (Dec. 27) that will beam live images of Earth back to your browser. The UrtheCast camera is the headline task for Expedition 38 astronauts Oleg Kotov and Sergey Ryazanskiy to perform, on top of installing a foot restraint and doing some equipment swapouts. This spacewalk, by the way, is not related in any way to the two successful contingency ones earlier this week to replace a faulty pump on station. The spacewalk is supposed to...

‘This issue is not related to the spacesuit water leak that was seen during a July spacewalk.’ The sublimator is a device in the spacesuit's backpack that helps dissipate excess heat. Rather than allow Mastracchio, 53, to wear that suit again, astronauts are planning to work on resizing a spare spacesuit aboard the ISS for him on his next spacewalk to complete the ammonia pump module replacement

Unexceptional: China becomes the third country to land a spacecraft on the moon in preparation for a manned visit. Meanwhile, U.S. astronauts have to ride Russian spacecraft to fix toilets on the International Space Station. Tourists visiting the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where one of America´s retired space shuttles now resides, were no doubt able to see news reports of the landing of China´s first lunar vehicle, a solar-powered rover, on the surface of the moon. The landing of the rover 37 years after the last such mission by the Soviet Luna 24 sample-return voyage in 1976 makes China...

A team of researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS), led by Professor Loh Kian Ping, who heads the Department of Chemistry at the NUS Faculty of Science, has successfully developed an innovative one-step method to grow and transfer high-quality graphene on silicon and other stiff substrates, opening up opportunities for graphene to be used in high-value applications that are currently not technologically feasible. This breakthrough, inspired by how beetles and tree frogs keep their feet attached to submerged leaves, is the first published technique that accomplishes both the growth and transfer steps of graphene on a silicon wafer....

BEIJING (AP) -- China on Saturday successfully carried out the world's first soft landing of a space probe on the moon in nearly four decades, the next stage in an ambitious space program that aims to eventually have a Chinese astronaut set foot on the moon. The unmanned Chang'e 3 lander, named after a mythical Chinese goddess of the moon, touched down on Earth's nearest neighbor following a 12-minute landing process.

China landed an unmanned spacecraft on the moon on Saturday, state media reported, in the first such "soft-landing" since 1976, joining the United States and the former Soviet Union in managing to accomplish such a feat. The Chang'e 3, a probe named after a lunar goddess in traditional Chinese mythology, is carrying the solar-powered Yutu, or Jade Rabbit buggy, which will dig and conduct geological surveys.