NASA

The last time we checked on the Voyager 1 & 2 they were hurtling towards the edge of the solar system at over 37,000 mph (60,000 km/h). The car-sized spacecraft are now and incredible 11 billion miles (17 billion km) and 8 billion miles (14 billion km) from Earth respectively – they are the longest continuously operated spacecraft in deep space and having traveled further than any man-made object, they will soon become the first to enter the realm of interstellar space. NASA recently held a briefing on the achievements of the program which gives us the opportunity to ponder where the Voyagers are, where they are going and the amazing scientific discoveries realized so far in their 33 year journey. Read More

The NASA space shuttle Discovery flew its last mission on February 24th, and now it's the Endeavour's turn to bow out of service. At 8:56 a.m. EDT this Monday (May 16), the shuttle launched from the Kennedy Space Center for the final time, on a mission to bring supplies to the International Space Station (ISS). Not only is it the last flight for the Endeavour, but the second-last flight within the entire shuttle program. Read More

Once the last of NASA’s space shuttle fleet shuffle off to retirement in a few months the space agency will be totally dependent on the Russian Soyuz to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station. At a cost of around US$63 million per seat, or more than $753 million a year, NASA is turning to the commercial companies to provide a more economical option. As part of the second round of funding for the agency’s Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) initiative that aims to stimulate development of privately operated crew vehicles to low Earth orbit, it will dole out grants totaling $269.3 million to four private companies. One of the recipients is SpaceX, which has been awarded $75 million to develop a launch escape system for its Dragon spacecraft. Read More

NASA's comet trekking spacecraft Stardust has officially ended operations. Stardust sent its last transmission to Earth on March 24 having traveled an incredible 3.54 billion miles over a 12 year period to become "NASA's most traveled comet hunter." Read More

After reaching orbit around Mercury on March 17, NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft has sent back its first image of our solar system’s innermost planet. The historic image, which was captured at 5:20 am EDT (U.S.), is the first ever captured from a spacecraft in orbit and is dominated by the rayed crater named Debussy. The bottom portion of the image also shows a region of Mercury’s surface near the planet’s south pole that had not previously been seen by spacecraft. Read More

The final touchdown of space shuttle Discovery at Kennedy Space Center in Florida earlier this month marked the end of a remarkable career for the oldest of the surviving NASA shuttles. Since its first mission in 1984, Discovery has carried out 39 flights and traveled more than 143 million miles. It was the first shuttle to return to service after the Challenger and Columbia accidents, it carried the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit, has docked 13 times with the International Space Station and carried more than 250 crew members (including the oldest man in space - John Glenn). Read More

The first Orion crew module has begun testing at Lockheed Martin's Space Operations Simulation Center (SOSC) in Denver, Colorado. This 41,000 square foot research facility will test the ability of NASA's next-gen multipurpose exploration spacecraft to safely fly astronauts through the severe environments of deep space. Orion will be phased in as the sun sets on the Space Shuttle Program with the first orbital flight test planned for 2013 and first crewed mission by 2016. Read More

NASA has reported that its MESSENGER spacecraft is now in orbit around the planet Mercury – the first ever mission to achieve this feat. More than 40 years on from the first moon landing in the age of the Mars rovers and space tourism, it's easy to overlook just what a remarkable a feat this is. These amazing facts might just jolt our sense of wonder – before reaching orbit on Thursday at approximately 9 pm EDT, MESSENGER traveled for six and a half years and covered 4.9-billion-miles in which it went through three flybys of Mercury, one of Earth and two of Venus. After firing its main thruster for 15 minutes the spacecraft slowed by 1,929 mph (leaving around 10 percent of fuel in the tank for orbit correction maneuvers) and it is now in a 12 hour elliptical orbit around the innermost planet some 96.35 million miles from Earth. Read More

Using a complex model to perform a theoretical calculation based on a U.S. Geological Survey, Richard Gross of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has determined that by changing the distribution of the Earth's mass, the earthquake that devastated Japan last Friday should have sped up the Earth's rotation, resulting in a day that is about 1.8 microseconds (1.8 millionths of a second) shorter. Read More