Space

Comet Wild 2 Dust And The Birth Of The Solar System

Our solar system started as a disk of microscopic dust, gas, and ice around the young Sun and the amazing diversity of planets, moons, asteroids, and comets came from this primitive dust.  NASA's Stardust mission has returned to Earth with samples of ...

Article - News Staff - May 20 2015 - 10:29am

Is It True That An Asteroid Will Strike Earth On [Insert Date Here]?- Truth Behind Asteroid Scare Stories

This is a question that is frequently asked on Quora, with a different date each time. We get a fair number of quite worried people asking this question, in all seriousness, concerned that Earth is about to be hit by a giant impactor. Sometimes they have ...

Article - Robert Walker - Sep 22 2015 - 6:07pm

WISE J224607.57-052635.0, The Most Luminous Galaxy In The Universe

A remote galaxy shining with infrared light equal to more than 300,000,000,000,000 suns has been discovered using data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE. The galaxy, belongs to a new class of objects nicknamed extremely luminous in ...

Article - News Staff - May 21 2015 - 3:07pm

NaSt1- One-Of-A-Kind 'Nasty' Star

NaSt1, about 3,000 light years away, was discovered a few decades ago and identified as a Wolf-Rayet star, a rapidly evolving star that is much more massive than our Sun. Wolf-Rayet stars lose their hydrogen-filled outer layers quickly, exposing a super-ho ...

Article - News Staff - May 21 2015 - 4:57pm

Will NASA's Sample Return Answer Mars Life Questions? Need For Comparison With In Situ Search

When Curiosity's successor and the ExoMars rover land on Mars around 2021, we will see two different approaches to the search for life on the planet side by side. NASA's mission is the first stage of a sample return program. The ESAs ExoMars rov ...

Article - Robert Walker - Apr 8 2016 - 5:21am

Predictions Of Solar Storms Have Not Been Very Accurate- Until Now

When a space hurricane was unleashed from the sun on January 7 2014, space-weather centers around the world sent out warnings. The hurricane was heading directly for Earth and was predicted to produce a strong geomagnetic storm. But then an unexpected thi ...

Article - The Conversation - Jun 5 2015 - 11:00am

Chaotic Tumbling Of Pluto's Moons

If you lived on one of Pluto's moons, you might have a hard time determining when, or from which direction, the sun will rise each day. Two of Pluto's moons, Nix and Hydra, wobble unpredictably, according to a new data analysis. ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 3 2015 - 6:53pm

Glass On Mars A Window Into Past Life?

 Researchers have used satellite data to detect deposits of glass within impact craters on Mars. Though formed in the searing heat of a violent impact, the glasses just might provide a delicate window into the possibility of past life on the Red Planet. Ov ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 9 2015 - 10:30am

Are There Habitats For Life On Mars?- Salty Seeps, Clear Ice Greenhouses, Ice Fumaroles, Dune Bioreactors,...

The present day habitability of Mars is an area of research that has exploded hugely in the last decade, to the extent that it's often hard to keep track of everything that's going on. This is by way of background material for my other articles ...

Article - Robert Walker - Jan 11 2017 - 10:54pm

Human Spaceflight At "Coastline Hugging Phase"- Lunar Villages Not Interplanetary Voyages- Op. Ed.

Elon Musk, and NASA both have in mind the idea of doing interplanetary voyages straight away, aiming for Mars, with Obama going so far as to say about the Moon: “But I just have to say pretty bluntly here: We’ve been there before.”. If you hold that view, ...

Article - Robert Walker - Jun 10 2015 - 8:42pm