Late tomorrow evening (AEST), all going well, a Falcon 9 rocket will lift-off from Cape Canaveral, Florida. A few days after launch the craft will rendezvous in low-Earth orbit with the International Space…
You know how it is: you open the envelope, you've got the job, you're walking on air.
NASA
NASA is currently poring over more than 6,000 applications for the next intake in its astronaut program – from which nine to 15 candidates will be successful. And while the Space Shuttle program is a thing…
Many exoplanets have been found, but there's plenty left to uncover.
Dallas1200am
Over the past few months, NASA’s Kepler mission has repeatedly made headlines with announcements of new and unusual planetary systems around other stars. To name a few, we’ve had the most densely packed…
Does the US suffer from its desire to go it alone in space?
NASA
In its newly released budget request to Congress, the Obama Administration is seeking to reduce NASA’s funding by US$59m to US$17.7 billion – a reduction of just 0.03%, not that you would know that from…
The Apollo missions yielded more than just great views of our home planet.
NASA
By the time the Apollo Program ended in 1972 it had cost NASA roughly US$170 billion dollars (in today’s terms). It was seen as a waste of money by some, but almost 40 years since the launch of Apollo…
An ice-free world isn't impossible – even though it seems the stuff of science fiction.
Alistair Knock
Last December’s meeting of the American Geophysical Union featured three of the world’s leading climate scientists: James Hansen (NASA’s chief climate scientist), Elco Rohling (National Oceanography Centre…
NASA's Mars Science Laboratory rover, Curiosity.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
It seems we’re about to come one step closer to putting man (and woman) on Mars. Is this exciting? Of course it is. Nothing fires the imagination quite like the prospect of walking around on a planet other…
Look on the bright side, earthlings: it'll probably never happen.
Shanon Wise
You might want to look up. Or maybe not.
At some point between now and Saturday, a 6.5 tonne, bus-sized NASA satellite will burst through Earth’s atmosphere, breaking into fiery chunks that could land…
The brand new launch system announced by NASA last week has received wide mainstream media coverage – and why wouldn’t it? It is a plan for a giant rocket, after all.
The proposed Space Launch System…
Malcolm Walter talks space, science and NASA's future with Dr Greg Chamitoff.
Download the full interview with Dr Chamitoff as a podcast by clicking here.
For the latest in our In Conversation series, Malcolm Walter, Professor of Astrobiology at the University of New South…
Could Stanley Kubrick's classic offer direction for the future of space travel?
slagheap
Tomorrow morning (AEST), weather depending, the Space Shuttle Atlantis will blast off from Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, marking the end of NASA’s 30-year-old Space Transportation System.
But as the…
When a black hole devours a nearby star, bright gamma-ray flashes can result.
Mark Garlick (University of Warwick)
Some 3.8 billion years ago a star in the constellation of Draco wandered a little too close to a nearby black hole.
The star was violently torn apart by the black hole’s tidal forces, creating two massive…
Keeping the space shuttle together is a tremendous feat of engineering.
Stan Honda/AFP
The Space Shuttle Endeavour, one of the most complex machines ever created, is about to take its last trip into space.
But not just yet.
The countdown to Endeavour’s final flight began a few days ago…
Scientists believe dark matter makes up 23% of the universe.
NASA
By Jeremy Mould, Swinburne University of Technology
Dark matter has worked its way back into the news in the last few days with the completion of a detection experiment in a tunnel deep under the Italian Alps.
Researchers from Columbia University used…
Hundreds of exoplanets have been discovered, but are we any closer to finding life?
AAP
In the late 1980s, when I was a young whipper-snapper just starting out as an astronomer, it was quite obvious some fields had an incredibly high profile and others were outré.
The sexy ideas at the time…
It is inevitable that we will one day venture into space beyond the moon not just with robots but in person.
Exploration is part of the human psyche: we are risk-takers with an insatiable curiosity. No…
