Spacecraft

NASA’s Kepler space mission may be coming to an unexpected end. The space agency announced on Wednesday that the spacecraft, designed to seek out possible earth-like extraterrestrial bodies, has suffered a malfunction that may make it impossible to carry on with its search.  Read More

When most people send images from their smartphones, they tend to be of what the photographer is having for dinner or someone doing something very silly in the pub [or cats – Ed]. NASA has raised the bar for phone snaps out of the atmosphere by using smartphones installed in "nanosatellites" in low Earth orbit to send back images of the Earth. The three satellites, called Alexander, Graham and Bell, flew in space between April 21 and 27 as part of a mission to show how satellites could be built cheaper using off-the-shelf components.  Read More

Haikus to Mars may sound like the title of a 1950s sci-fi B movie, but that’s what NASA is asking for. The space agency is inviting the public to submit haikus to be recorded on a DVD that will be carried by the unmanned Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) spacecraft, which is scheduled to launch in November.  Read More

All good things come to an end and the European Space Agency’s Herschel Space Observatory mission is no exception. After more than three years in orbit, the most powerful infrared telescope ever flown in space has ceased scientific operations after the last of the liquid helium used to supercool its instruments ran out.  Read More

The history of spaceflight is filled with great images, such as Neil Armstrong setting foot on the Moon or Viking 1’s first images from Mars, but some of the most dramatic events haven’t any images to accompany them. As NASA's two Voyager spacecraft leave the Solar System, there won’t be any historic pictures sent back. Instead, that invisible boundary between our system and interstellar space will be marked by readings taken by the instruments of the spacecraft. NASA has placed a readout on the Voyager mission home page that shows two of three key factors that will let the public know when this momentous milestone has been reached.  Read More

When Orbital Science Corporation's Antares rocket lofted a simulated spacecraft mass into orbit on its maiden flight from NASA's Wallops Island Flight Facility in Virginia on Sunday, it also carried a piggyback cargo of three NASA nanosatellites. These “PhoneSats,” which were built using smartphone and off-the-shelf consumer components in a standard cubesat frame, may be the cheapest satellites ever launched.  Read More

Orbital Sciences Corporation’s Antares rocket lifted off Sunday at 5:00 PM EDT (21:00 GMT) from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport Pad-0A at NASA”s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. The launch was the first from the pad at Wallops and also the first flight of Antares, which carried a "mass simulated payload" equivalent to the mass of a spacecraft into Earth orbit.  Read More

NASA has announced that the Kepler space probe has discovered two planetary systems that include the smallest planets yet found that lie in the "habitable zone." The systems include three super-Earth size planets, with one of them being a habitable-zone exoplanet that is the closest in size to Earth yet discovered.  Read More

The European Space Agency (ESA) wants to bring the sort of precision normally associated with Swiss watch making to satellite navigation. When it launches in 2017, ESA’s Proba-3 mission will incorporate the first satellite pair capable of flying in formation to within a tolerance of a millimeter to one another. It's part of a demonstration technology that could one day be used to build space telescopes using formation-flying satellites as a “rigid structure” that would be impossibly large to achieve in a single spacecraft.  Read More