This great image of US President Nixon and NASA Administrator Dr. James Fletcher shared today by NASA marks the 40th anniversary – January 5, 1972 – of the announcement by President Nixon of the start of the Space Shuttle program, and the beginning of 40 amazing years of innovation and achievement, as well as tragedy [...]
Is your portion of the night sky polluted by artificial light? Check out this really slick Google Map interface I found on the International Dark-Sky Association (IDA) web site . For over 22 years, the IDA has been advocating to keep our night sky clean of light pollution. Their reasons go beyond astronomy purposes and [...]
Ok, not Mars. Not just yet, at least. Researchers have created really cool science project called MAPPER. The idea is to leverage citizen scientists to comb through data and find signs of life on far away planets. For now, they have tapped into a couple of DeepWorker bots currently exploring the depths of two lakes [...]
Today (July 20th) marks the 42nd anniversary of landing the first man on the moon. I think most people are fairly familiar with the amount of engineering work it took to get three men to the moon (and two landing on it). What many of us might be a little less aware of is exactly [...]
I’ve already posted my thoughts on the approaching end of NASA’s space shuttle program, but Endeavor‘s last launch this morning went off perfectly, and reminded me once again how amazing the program has been. There will be one more shuttle flight, STS-135 in early July, when Atlantis takes its final trip into orbit. So, here’s [...]
NASA’s Messenger (MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry and Ranging) spacecraft is already sending us amazing imagery of the surface of Mercury as it orbits the planet on a mission to obtain information about Mercury and what it’s made of. This image, released by NASA yesterday, is the first image of Mercury taken from orbit: Messenger [...]
We’ve had more space posts than usual in the last week or so, but I wanted to give a shoutout to the Space Shuttle Discovery and its crew, for the safe landing and the successful completion of its final mission. I’m one of over 80,000 viewers watching the post-landing video stream on NASA TV over [...]
It’s the beginning of the end of an era for NASA’s shuttle program, as Discovery is set for its final launch at 4:50pm EST today, with Endeavor’s final mission currently scheduled for April, and Atlantis’ possibly the summer. I have always been a huge fan of the shuttle program, and can remember when I got [...]
I love anything space travel related. I love Monty Python. And anyone who’s seen me should find it self evident that I love cheese. This little news item about cheese in space naturally caught my eye and had to be passed on to our good readers. This week’s podcast features a news item concerning the [...]
