New Horizons Team Relieved After Spacecraft Phones Home
It took a little more than thirteen hours after NASA’s New Horizons mission made its historic close encounter with Pluto and its five known moons, but the piano-sized spacecraft finally phoned home to say that it’s OK and that the fly-by went according to plan. Anxious members of the New Horizons mission team at the […]
NASA’s Boomerang-Like Aircraft, Kid Athletes Excel in Class, Citrus and Skin Cancer
Boomerang-Like Aircraft Could Help NASA Find Landing Sites on Mars NASA has built a prototype of what it hopes to be the first aircraft to fly on Mars sometime in the 2020’s. Shaped like a boomerang, the flying wing Prandtl-m will be rather small, with a 61 cm wingspan, and weighing only about 454 grams. […]
June 2015 Science Images
Slumbering Giant Black Hole Awakes After 26 Years
Some 8,000 light years from Earth, in the constellation Cygnus, a binary system known as V404 Cygni has come to life for the first time in 26 years. While most binary systems consist of two stars orbiting a common center of mass, V404 Cygni is made up of a black hole and a star that […]
Science Scanner: Cat Videos Can Help You, Permanent Dust Cloud Surrounds Moon
Watching Cat Videos Can Give You a Boost You can hardly surf the Internet without stumbling across a cat video, and new research suggests those videos could actually be good for you. Of all the categories of YouTube video content, videos of cats have had more views per video. It’s been suggested that there were […]
Science Scanner: Monster Galaxy; Mars Missions On Vacation
Monster Galaxy Found Near Edge of Universe A group of researchers imaged a “monstrous galaxy” – SDP.81, located some 11.7 billion light-years from Earth, using the Atacama Large Millimeter/sub-millimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile and a natural magnification method called “gravitational lensing.” The researchers used the gravity of a massive galaxy 3.4 billion light-years away to […]
Pluto Moons Dance in Chaotic Orbit
Pluto and its moons seem to be engaged in a kind of chaotic dance routine with each other. After a thorough analysis of data gathered by the Hubble Space Telescope, NASA scientists found that Nix and Hydra – two of Pluto’s five known moons – are wobbling and behaving erratically as they orbit the distant […]
Science Images from May 2015
Science Scanner: Sea Salt on Europa; Natural Sunblock; ISS Crew Return Delayed
Sea Salt Covers Parts of Europa’s Surface Scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory found evidence that the dark material that covers parts of the surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa is probably sea salt produced by an ocean beneath its surface. The researchers believe that the existence of sea salt on the moon’s icy surface implies […]
Astronomers Detect a Galaxy Far, Far Away
Astronomers have discovered the most distant galaxy ever detected, gaining new insight into the early beginnings of our universe. Identified as EGS-zs8-1, the international team of astronomers measured its exact distance at 13 billion light years away from Earth. That means that light from the galaxy now reaching Earth was produced back when the universe […]