NASA

With NASA's Orion spacecraft intended to carry crews to the moon, an asteroid and Mars, it will be taking human beings farther into space than ever before. Hopefully, it will also be bringing them back, with the distance of the return trips seeing the spacecraft picking up a lot of speed and reentering the Earth’s atmosphere faster than any previous spacecraft. In the latest in a series of tests that bring the spacecraft another step towards a planned first test flight in 2014, NASA has verified the capsule will safely make it back to terra firma even if one of its drogue parachutes fails to open.  Read More

Sleep deprivation is no joke. It can cause lower performance, decreased memory, and even sickness. So, if you spend your life orbiting Earth on a $150B spacecraft, you're going to take sleep seriously. NASA, responding to an epidemic of insomnia, is ready to give the International Space Station (ISS) an LED makeover.  Read More

NASA’s two Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) spacecraft have struck the Moon in a controlled impact. At 5:28:46 EST (222846 GMT) Ebb, the first spacecraft, struck a mountain near the lunar North Pole. The second, Flow, hit about 20 seconds later. Because the impact occurred during a new moon, no images were available of the impact, though NASA was able to determine the time of the event by monitoring the moment that telemetry ended. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California provided live television and online commentary.  Read More

At a press conference today, NASA confirmed that its two Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) Spacecraft will crash into a lunar mountain next week. The controlled impact will occur on Monday, December 17 at approximately 5:28 p.m. EST (22:28 GMT). The impact area is at latitude 75.62° N, longitude 26.63° E near the lunar North Pole in the vicinity of Goldschmidt crater.  Read More

Data from NASA’s twin Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) probes has been used to create the highest resolution gravity map yet of any body in the Solar System. The two washing machine-sized spacecraft acted as a 225-kilometer (140 mi) long gravity detector for studying the interior composition of the Moon.  Read More

With Curiosity still rolling across the Red Planet, NASA has revealed it will be sending another rover to Mars in 2020. The announcement, which was made at the 2012 American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in San Francisco, also outlined the space agency’s plans for exploring Mars for the remainder of the decade.  Read More

NASA's Mars Curiosity rover has used its Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) and Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin) instruments to analyze its first scoop of Martian soil. These instruments allowed Curiosity to perform a wide range of chemical and structural tests which found signs of a complex and active soil chemistry – but no sign of life.  Read More

Voyager 1 has reached yet another new frontier on its historic journey towards the edge of our solar system. NASA scientists believe this “magnetic highway” represents the final region the spacecraft must cross before becoming the first man-made object to reach interstellar space, an event they are guessing could be as close as a couple of months away.  Read More

The MESSENGER spacecraft has made a compelling case for the presence of water in the form of ice on the surface of the Solar System's smallest and innermost planet, Mercury. The case is supported by three independent groups of evidence from different sensors aboard the Mercury orbiter.  Read More