Judging from his tone, Mitt Romney must have been hoping to paint Newt Gingrich as a spendthrift nut when he brought up Gingrich’s past support for a “lunar colony” at Saturday’s GOP debate, but Gingrich hit back with his usual bravado and made an important point: (more)
LOS ANGELES (AP) — In a Dec. 7 story about the Mars rover Opportunity, The Associated Press erroneously reported the affiliation of a scientist. Bruce Banerdt is a project scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., not NASA headquarters. (more)
NASA’s Kepler mission has confirmed its first planet in the “habitable zone,” the region where liquid water could exist on a planet’s surface. Kepler also has discovered more than 1,000 new planet candidates, nearly doubling its previously known count. Ten of these candidates are near-Earth-size and orbit in the habitable zone of their host star. Candidates require follow-up observations to verify they are actual planets. (more)
WASHINGTON (AP) — A newly discovered planet is eerily similar to Earth and is sitting outside Earth’s solar system in what seems to be the ideal place for life, except for one hitch. It is a bit too big. (more)
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — A rover of “monster truck” proportions zoomed toward Mars on an 8½-month, 354 million-mile journey Saturday, the biggest, best equipped robot ever sent to explore another planet. (more)
LOS ANGELES (AP) — The elaborate mission to recover a moon rock led NASA agents to one of the most down-to-earth places: a Denny’s restaurant in Riverside County. (more)
Impatient boffins will be able to download high resolution images and video from space probes in mere minutes if a newly approved NASA trial proves successful. (more)
In June 2010 NASA Administrator Charles F. Bolden, Jr., a retired Marine Corps major general, told Al Jazeera that one of his goals was “to reach out to and engage the Muslim world, making better known its historic contribution to science.” (more)
NASA astronomers recently announced their first discovery of a planet orbiting a binary star system. Officially known as Kepler-16b, the planet has been nicknamed “Tatooine” after Luke Skywalker’s home planet from the original Star Wars film. But unlike that fictional planet, this one is not inhabitable by any known life forms. And it exists in our own Milky Way, not some galaxy far, far away. (more)
WASHINGTON (AP) — To soar far away from Earth and even beyond the moon, NASA has dreamed up the world’s most powerful rocket, a behemoth that borrows from the workhorse liquid rockets that sent Apollo missions into space four decades ago. (more)
When the towers of the World Trade Center fell on September 11, 2001, one American was not on the planet. (more)
Critics of NASA aren’t saying “I told you so” yet, but some of them are surely muttering it under their breath. The word from the space agency last week was that the International Space Station (ISS), the American-led, $100-billion skyliner that has been continually occupied by astronauts for more than a decade, may have to be evacuated by early December if the Russian space agency can’t sort out what caused an unmanned Soyuz rocket on a resupply mission to crash into Siberia on Aug. 24, scattering nearly two tons of cargo across a barren stretch near the Mongolian border. Since post-shuttle NASA now relies on Soyuz rockets to carry American astronauts up and down, it may mean everyone out of the pool till the booster malfunction can be analyzed and fixed. (more)
NASA is at a crossroads. The agency faces nearly a decade without the launch of American rockets, leaving some to question whether the United States will lose its astronaut corps and its place as a leader in space. (more)
The origins of life may soon have an extraterrestrial explanation. NASA-funded researchers today announced that they had uncovered evidence that some crucial components of DNA found in asteroids did not originate on earth. (more)
The space shuttle program might be over, but NASA’s still hard at work. The agency recently released data and photos that suggest that Mars might have flowing water during its warmer months. (more)
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — With a cry from its commander to “light this fire one more time,” the last shuttle thundered into orbit Friday on a cargo run that will close out three decades of both triumph and tragedy for NASA and usher in a period of uncertainty for America’s space program. (more)
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — NASA’s last space shuttle countdown is under way, but lousy weather may delay Friday’s launch attempt. (more)
MIAMI — NASA is suing former astronaut Edgar Mitchell to get back a camera that went to the moon on the Apollo 14 mission. (more)
Add one more high-flying achievement to the resume of Silicon Valley entrepreneur Elon Musk: Heinlein Prize Trust winner. (more)
Some members of the Tea Party movement have zeroed in on a multi-billion dollar area of government spending. This time, it isn’t health care or the public debt -– but outer space. (more)
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