Pluto Flyby Data Feed Complete; Nearby Exoplanet May Have Oceans
New Horizon’s Sends Final Data of Pluto Flyby The final bits of data gathered by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft during its July 2015 flyby of Pluto were received this week by its mission operations center at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. More than 50 gigabytes of observational data was stored on the […]
Close Call for ISS; Threat to Polar Bears; Binary System Cannibal
ISS Crewmembers Back to Work after Close Call with Space Junk Fear that a floating piece of space junk could impact the ISS sent astronauts the station’s crew scrambling onto a docked Soyuz TMA-16M spacecraft on Friday (07/17). Luckily, the debris passed the station harmlessly, and the crew was back at work. Houston’s Mission Control […]
Science Scanner: Orion Set for Test, Mars Meteorite May Have Organic Matter, Heavy Newborns Excel in School, Oceans Help Warming Hiatus
NASA Readies Orion Spacecraft for Test Flight Excitement continues to build in Florida as NASA makes final preparations for the tomorrow’s (12/4/14) first unmanned flight test of Orion spacecraft, which the space agency plans to use to send astronauts to an asteroid and then to Mars. Liftoff has been set for 1105 UTC from Space […]
Ancient Zircon Reveals Age of Earth’s Crust
A tiny sliver of ancient zircon reveals the crust of our planet formed at least 4.4 billion years ago—160 million years after the birth of the solar system, according to a new study. Earth itself is believed to be about 4.5 billion years old. The researchers examined some of the oldest materials ever found on […]