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It would be fair to say that the crashy culmination of NASA's LCROSS mission on October 9th was a technical success but a public-relations fizzle. LCROSS on final approach LCROSS and its Centaur rocket prepare to crash into the Moon. NASA On the plus side, the engineering team for LCROSS (short for Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite) delivered as promised, deftly driving a spent 2½-ton Centaur rocket into a target zone near the Moon's south pole only 2 miles (3½ km) across. Four minutes later, after flying through the debris cloud raised by the rocket's crash, an instrument-packed 600-kg...

What if the discrepancy arises from a flaw in our theory of gravity rather than from some provider of mass that we cannot see? In the 1980s physicist Mordehai Milgrom of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, proposed a modification to Newtonian dynamics that would explain many of the observational discrepancies without requiring significant mass to be hidden away in dark matter. But it fell short of describing all celestial objects, and to incorporate the full span of gravitational interactions, a modification to Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity is needed. A review article in the November 6...

"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." —The Bhagavad Gita Seven years after the nuclear tests in Alamogordo, New Mexico, Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, was lecturing at a college when a student asked if there were any U.S. atomic tests before Alamogordo. “Yes, in modern times,” he replied. The sentence, enigmatic and incomprehensible at the time, was actually an allusion to ancient Hindu texts that describe an apocalyptic catastrophe that doesn’t correlate with volcanic eruptions or other known phenomena. Oppenheimer, who avidly studied ancient Sanskrit, was undoubtedly referring to a passage in...

Back in 1980 the US space programme was in the doldrums. Apollo was fading into history and there hadn't been a US astronaut in space for five years. The quirky space shuttle, much diminished from its initial vision, was still waiting to make its maiden flight. But that fall came Cosmos, a revolutionary documentary series with a compelling host. Both the television universe and the real one have never been quite the same. Carl Sagan, by equal measure professorial and childlike, offered space enthusiasts a new paradigm. Buck Rogers was out; refined and groovy cosmic citizen was in. Here was...

Scene 1: The White House Rose Garden. The President of the United States is standing before a crowd of amateur astronomers, students and teachers, with his science adviser by his side. In front of him: a telescope. The president bends down and presses his eye to the eyepiece. Flashbulbs pop. Scene 2: Kennedy Space Center. The Ares 1-X rocket sits on the launch pad, ready for its first test flight. More than 300-feet tall but fewer than 20 feet in diameter, it looks as precarious as a flying chopstick, but tomorrow's astronauts might ride a rocket like this one to...

A California-based team of engineers has snagged a $1 million NASA prize by winning a pitched competition to fly homemade rockets on mock moon landing missions. Masten Space Systems of Mojave, Calif., successfully flew its rocket Xoie (pronounced Zoey) twice within a set time limit to qualify for the top Level 2 prize in the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge, a NASA-sponsored contest to build mock lunar landers.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. military needs to deepen dialogue with China to better understand the intent of its space programs, a U.S. general said on Tuesday, after a Chinese commander announced plans to develop offensive military capabilities in space. General Kevin Chilton, head of the Pentagon's Strategic Command which coordinates U.S. military operations in space, said China-watchers had been "absolutely amazed" by the country's advances in its space programs over the past decade.

PANNITHITTU, India -- In this seaside village, the children of farmers and fishermen aspire to become something that their impoverished parents never thought possible: astronauts.

Space explorers have yet to get their hands on the replicator of "Star Trek" to create anything they might require. But NASA has developed a technology that could enable lunar colonists to carry out on-site manufacturing on the moon, or allow future astronauts to create critical spare parts during the long trip to Mars.

The Obama adminstration must react responsibly to China’s declaration that military operations in space are inevitable, a top China expert says. “How will the US react to Chinese diplomatic efforts in light of the PLA’s blunt statements on space warfare? This is something the Obama administration has to take into account,” said Dean Cheng, China specialist at Washington’s Heritage Foundation. “Are we going to see outrage, any meaningful reactions to the Chinese statements or again that it was someone speaking out of school and we just aren’t sure.”

When scientists search the heavens for habitable worlds beyond Earth, they don't necessarily know what to look for. A new study has found that the most probable place to find intelligent life in the galaxy is around stars with roughly the mass of the sun, and surface temperatures between 5,300 and 6,000 Kelvin (9,100 and 10,300 degrees Fahrenheit) - in fact, stars very similar to our own sun.

Pull me up, Scotty. At least one team has qualified for part of a $2 million prize up for grabs in this year's Space Elevator Games, a NASA-sponsored contest to build machines that can climb a cable in the sky – precursors for a futuristic transit system to space. On Wednesday, an entry by the Washington state-based team LaserMotive climbed a 3,000-foot (900-meter) tether suspended by a helicopter at a speed of about 8 mph (13 kph). The feat was the best performance yet of a miniature space elevator prototype, though still a long shot away from what would be...

Striking new photos of water-vapor geysers erupting from Saturn's moon Enceladus were beamed to Earth this week by NASA's Cassini spacecraft in orbit around the ringed planet.

A vast pool of molten rock in the continental crust that underlies southwestern Washington state could supply magma to three active volcanoes in the Cascade Mountains -- Mount St. Helens , Mount Rainier and Mount Adams... Other scientists dismiss the existence... Rather than magma heated to 1,300 to 1,400 degrees, some think it could be water... Seth Moran , a volcano seismologist with the USGS Cascades Volcano Observatory in Vancouver, Wash... said the most telling evidence that the theory was wrong was the lack of any surface evidence, such as geothermal vents or hot springs, among the mountains that would...

Jim Krehbiel was up past midnight making a piece of art by layering maps and field notes onto photos he had taken of an ancient ritual site high on a cliff ledge in the desert Southwest. He looked at the image of the kiva and remembered how the ruins were nearly inaccessible. Krehbiel had to lower himself on a rope to reach them. Why, he wondered that night in the fall of 2007, would anyone build something so important in such a remote spot among the canyons and mesas? It was then that the chairman of Ohio Wesleyan University's art...

A gigantic, previously unknown set of galaxies has been found in the distant universe, shedding light on the underlying skeleton of the cosmos. "Matter is not distributed uniformly in the universe," said Masayuki Tanaka, an astronomer with the European Southern Observatory (ESO) who helped discover the galactic assemblage. "In our cosmic vicinity, stars form in galaxies and galaxies usually form groups and clusters of galaxies." But those collections of matter are just small potatoes compared to larger structures long-theorized to exist. "The most widely accepted cosmological theories predict that matter also clumps on a larger scale in the so-called 'cosmic...

BANGALORE: For the first time since the success of India's maiden unmanned moon mission, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is ready to outsource more high-end work to private companies — everything from building more complicated systems to assembling it.

Masten Space Systems' Xoie rocket prototype has apparently taken the lead in a nail-biting race for a million-dollar prize from NASA. The Masten team's "try, try again" effort at California's Mojave Air and Space Port was aimed at winning the top prize in the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge's Level 2 contest. Although the contest's outcome hasn't been announced, it looks as if Friday's flight was good enough to best Texas-based Armadillo Aerospace, which qualified for the prize with its Scorpius rocket last month. A dark-horse team in the race, California-based Unreasonable Rocket, put in a valiant effort during several...

Full Moon Names and Their Meanings Full Moon names date back to Native Americans, of what is now the northern and eastern United States. The tribes kept track of the seasons by giving distinctive names to each recurring full Moon. Their names were applied to the entire month in which each occurred. There was some variation in the Moon names, but in general, the same ones were current throughout the Algonquin tribes from New England to Lake Superior. European settlers followed that custom and created some of their own names. Since the lunar month is only 29 days long on...

NASA's Kepler mission is unlikely to detect any Earth-like exoplanets before 2011 due to an electronic glitchKepler, NASA's mission to search for planets around other stars, will not be able to spot an Earth-sized planet until 2011, according to the mission's team. The delays are caused by noisy amplifiers in the telescope's electronics. The team is racing to fix the issue by changing the way data from the telescope is processed, but the delay could mean that ground-based observers now have the upper hand in the race to be the first to spot an Earth twin. "We're not going to...

A giant cloud of hydrogen gas is speeding toward a collision with our Milky Way Galaxy, and when it hits -- in less than 40 million years -- it may set off a spectacular burst of stellar fireworks.

Cobbling together 3000 individual photographs, a physicist has made a new high-resolution panoramic image of the full night sky, with the Milky Way galaxy as its centerpiece. Axel Mellinger, a professor at Central Michigan University, describes the process of making the panorama in the November issue of Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.

An inscribed stele erected at Thebes by Ahmose, the first Pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty, documents a destructive storm accompanied by flooding during his reign. Fragments of the stele were found in the 3rd Pylon of the temple of Karnak at Thebes between 1947 and 1951 by the French Mission. A restoration of the stele and translation of the text was published by Claude Vandersleyen (1967). In the following year (1968), Vandersleyen added two more fragments, one from the top of the inscription and a small piece from line 10 of the restored text, which had been recovered by Egyptian...

-- All-New Episodes to Air Beginning Wednesday, January 20, 2010, at 9 PM (ET/PT) -- (Silver Spring, Md.) Science Channel has commissioned renowned production company LMNO Cable Group for six all-new episodes of the network's hit special METEORITE MEN. As production continues, the series will chronicle modern day treasure hunters Geoff Notkin and Steve Arnold as they traverse North America in search of rare, lost pieces of our universe. METEORITE MEN is scheduled to debut Wednesday, January 20, 2010, at 9 PM (ET/PT). Notkin and Arnold have searched the world for remnants of meteorites for years. The duo uses inventive,...

As we recently noted, Stephen Hawking has stepped down from the Lucasian Chair at Cambridge. The chair didn't stay empty for long. It has been announced that Michael Green will become the new Lucasian Professor. Green is one of the pioneers of string theory, and is already at Cambridge. I'm not sure he even switches offices, or chairs for that matter. Hawking did seminal work in general relativity. He proved a number of singularity theorems (with Roger Penrose). He wrote The Large Scale Structure of Spacetime (with George Ellis). John Wheeler conjectured that quiescent black holes have "no hair" (i.e.,...

As promised, Brian Cox was on The Colbert Report last night, and hit it out of the park. The whole show was better than average (which is saying a lot) but Brian truly rocked! If you missed it (and live in the States) the whole episode is online (Brian's segment is about 13:50 into the episode). Comedy Central won't allow embedding the whole show (sigh), and Brian's segment isn't separated out on the CC site, but right before he was on Colbert ragged on physics and the LHC... In the full segment, they talk about Brian's book Why E=mc2, which...

When the Fermi team did the calculations, using the most conservative estimates for how astrophysics plays into this, they determined that the mass scale must be at least 1.2 times the Planck mass, and by using reasonable but less conservative assumptions, they derived lower limits on the mass scale of up to 100 times the Planck mass. One way to interpret this is to say that there is no variation of the speed of light coming from any quantum gravity effects at less than 1.2 times the Planck mass. And given that some quantum gravity frameworks predict that effects should...

PARIS (AFP) – It took 13 billion years to reach Earth, but astronomers have seen the light of an exploding mega-star that is the most distant object ever detected, two studies published Thursday reported. The stunning gamma-ray burst (GRB) was observed by two teams of researchers in April, and opens a window onto a poorly known period when the Universe was in its infancy.

“There is a likely chance of tsunami waves reaching the shores of Israel,” says Dr. Beverly Goodman of the Leon H. Charney School of Marine Sciences at the University of Haifa following an encompassing geo-archaeological study at the port of Caesarea. “Tsunami events in the Mediterranean do occur less frequently than in the Pacific Ocean, but our findings reveal a moderate rate of recurrence,” she says. Dr. Goodman, an expert geo-archaeologist, exposed geological evidence of this by chance. Her original intentions in Caesarea were to assist in research at the ancient port and at offshore shipwrecks. “We expected to find...

Starting in 2010, an international crew of six will simulate a 520-day round-trip to Mars, including a 30-day stay on the martian surface. In reality, they will live and work in a sealed facility in Moscow, Russia, to investigate the psychological and medical aspects of a long-duration space mission. ESA is looking for European volunteers to take part. The ‘mission’ is part of the Mars500 programme being conducted by ESA and Russia’s Institute of Biomedical Problems (IBMP) to study human psychological, medical and physical capabilities and limitations in space through fundamental and operational research. ESA’s Directorate of Human Spaceflight is...

Click here to view the amazing video! Sir Isaac Newton would be amazed by this awesome video, showing Saturn moons causing gravitational waves as they orbit near its F Ring. These images can only be taken every 15 years, during Saturn's equinox. Thankfully, Cassini is there now. In the video you can see Prometheus (in the inner side) and Pandora (on the outer side), disturbing and smoothing the rings one after the other, which is why they are called shepherd moons. Things get even more spectacular in the Keeler gap, inside the A ring. There, Daphnis surfs the ring creating...

Get Out: Orionid Meteor Shower Peaks Overnight SPACE.com Robert Roy Britt editorial Director Tue Oct 20. The Orionid meteor shower is expected to put on a good show tonight into the predawn hours Wednesday, weather permitting. This annual meteor shower is created when Earth passes through trails of comet debris left in space long ago by Halley's Comet. The "shooting stars" develop when bits typically no larger than a pea , and mostly sand-grain-sized, vaporize in Earth's upper atmosphere. "Flakes of comet dust hitting the atmosphere should give us dozens of meteors per hour," said Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid...

CULVER CITY, Calif., and THE INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION, Low Earth Orbit, The Milky Way Galaxy, Oct. 19 /PRNewswire/ -- To celebrate the Solar System Premiere of Columbia Pictures' new animated comedy Planet 51, which will be released in theaters on Earth November 20, 2009, the film is currently orbiting the planet on the International Space Station!

<p>WASHINGTON – Astronomers have found 32 new planets outside our solar system, adding evidence to the theory that the universe has many places where life could develop.</p> <p>Scientists using European Southern Observatory telescopes didn't find any planets quite the size of Earth or any that seemed habitable or even unusual. But their announcement increased the number of planets discovered outside the solar system to more than 400.</p>

TORONTO, ON – According to a new study by geologists at the University of Toronto and the University of Maryland, the wealth of some minerals that lie in the rock beneath the Earth's surface may be extraterrestrial in origin. "The extreme temperature at which the Earth's core formed more than four billion years ago would have completely stripped any precious metals from the rocky crust and deposited them in the core," says James Brenan of the Department of Geology at the University of Toronto and co-author of the study published in Nature Geoscience on October 18. "So, the next question...

The strongest limit on the number of possible universes is the human ability to distinguish between different universes. (PhysOrg.com) -- Over the past few decades, the idea that our universe could be one of many alternate universes within a giant multiverse has grown from a sci-fi fantasy into a legitimate theoretical possibility. Several theories of physics and astronomy have hypothesized the existence of a multiverse made of many parallel universes. One obvious question that arises, then, is exactly how many of these parallel universes might there be. In a new study, Stanford physicists Andrei Linde and Vitaly Vanchurin have calculated...

October 15, 2009: For years, researchers have known that the solar system is surrounded by a vast bubble of magnetism. Called the "heliosphere," it springs from the sun and extends far beyond the orbit of Pluto, providing a first line of defense against cosmic rays and interstellar clouds that try to enter our local space. Although the heliosphere is huge and literally fills the sky, it emits no light and no one has actually seen it. Until now. NASA's IBEX (Interstellar Boundary Explorer) spacecraft has made the first all-sky maps of the heliosphere and the results have taken researchers by...

In the murky boundary between our solar system and the rest of the galaxy, scientists have spotted a bright band of surprising high-energy emissions. The results come from the first all-sky map created by NASA's new Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) spacecraft, which launched in October 2008. While orbiting Earth, IBEX monitors incoming neutral atoms that originate billions of miles away at the solar system's edge to learn about the interaction between the sun and the cold expanse of space. "The IBEX results are truly remarkable, with emissions not resembling any of the current theories or models of this never-before-seen region,"...

Boulder, CO, USA -- A mysterious basin off the coast of India could be the largest, multi-ringed impact crater the world has ever seen. And if a new study is right, it may have been responsible for killing the dinosaurs off 65 million years ago. Sankar Chatterjee of Texas Tech University and a team of researchers took a close look at the massive Shiva basin, a submerged depression west of India that is intensely mined for its oil and gas resources. Some complex craters are among the most productive hydrocarbon sites on the planet. Chatterjee will present his research at...

Editor's note: this article was originally published in Space News and is reprinted here courtesy of its author. On behalf of myself and all of us at Bigelow Aerospace let me first congratulate you on becoming NASA administrator. I'm sure the joy you must feel in being entrusted with leading such an extraordinary organization is only rivaled by the difficulty of the decisions you are now facing.

We all have a time for only a fleeting apprehension of Our Universe. Living for a finite time within our human bodies, we all perceive our surrounding Universe differently. Rene Descartes famously declared he could trust nothing more than the fact that he was a thinking, observing being. The very basis of experiencing life is our ability to observe.

Stand by for yet another "significant discovery" in the field of exoplanets. That's the word that will come out next week from an international gathering of exoplanet experts during a conference in Porto, Portugal. The new finding makes use of the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher. Called HARPS for short, this device is a spectrograph for use with ESO's 3.6-meter telescope. B The noteworthy revelation is to be announced on Monday, October 19. Detailing the finding will be Stephane Udry of the Geneva Observatory in Switzerland, Xavier Bonfils of the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Grenoble in...

A painting from 1617 appears to show a type of telescope thought not to have been built until much later. It's hard to find an invention more emblematic of the birth of modern science than the telescope. And yet surprisingly little is known about its early development. The inventor of the telescope remains unknown to this day. Now a study of the paintings of Jan Brueghel the Elder, a Flemish painter of the Baroque era who was working in Amsterdam at the beginning of the 17th century, is throwing some light on the early development of the telescope. It has...

A recent NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image captures what appears to be one very bright and bizarre galaxy, but is actually the result of a pair of spiral galaxies that resemble our own Milky Way smashing together at breakneck speeds. The product of this dramatic collision, called NGC 2623, or Arp 243, is about 250 million light-years away in the constellation of Cancer (the Crab). Not surprisingly, interacting galaxies have a dramatic effect on each other. Studies have revealed that as galaxies approach one another massive amounts of gas are pulled from each galaxy towards the centre of the other,...

SYDNEY: The globe-spanning ocean on Jupiter’s moon Europa contains about twice the liquid water of all Earth’s oceans combined, says a new study, which finds it’s packed with oxygen which could support life.

Mayan elder Apolinario Chile Pixtun is so over with being asked about the end of the world, "I came back from England last year and, man, they had me fed up with this stuff." But it doesn't look as though the frantic anxiety about the Mayan calendar ending in 2012 is going to let up anytime soon. With a blockbuster film entitled 2012 on the way and new websites being dedicated to the impending apocalypse every day, now, more than ever, the idea seems to be gaining momentum. But Chile Pixtun says the doomsday theories actually have their genesis in...

Are we the lone sentient life in the universe? So far, we have no evidence to the contrary, and yet the odds that not one single other planet has evolved intelligent life would appear, from a statistical standpoint, to be quite small. There are an estimated 250 billion (2.5 x 10¹¹ ) stars in the Milky Way alone, and over 70 sextillion (7 x 10²² ) in the visible universe, and many of them are surrounded by multiple planets. Meanwhile, our 4.5 billion-year old Solar System exits in a universe that is estimated to be between 13.5 and 14 billion years...

The year 2012 will not bring the end of the world, a Mayan elder has insisted, despite claims that a Mayan calendar shows that time will "run out" on December 21 of that year. Apolinario Chile Pixtun is tired of being bombarded with frantic questions about the end of the world. "I came back from England last year and, man, they had me fed up with this stuff," he said. A significant time period for the Mayans does end on the date, and enthusiasts have found a series of astronomical alignments they say coincide in 2012, including one that happens...

No evidence of an extraterrestrial impact 13,000 years ago, studies say. An independent study has cast more doubt on a controversial theory that a comet exploded over icy North America nearly 13,000 years ago, wiping out the Clovis people and many of the continent's large animals.Sediments at the San Jon site, in eastern New Mexico, contained very low abundances of magnetic spherules said to be evidence of an impact.Vance Holliday Archaeologists have examined sediments at seven Clovis-age sites across the United States, and did not find enough magnetic cosmic debris to confirm that an extraterrestrial impact happened at that time,...

Can we calculate the gravitational field of a mass moving close to the speed of light? Franklin Felber (Starmark Inc) believes he can, with implications for propulsion. Back in 2006 we looked briefly at Felber’s work, describing what the physicist believes to be a repulsive gravitational field that emerges from his results. Felber discussed the matter at the Space Technology and Applications International meeting that year, where he presented his calculations of the ‘relativistically exact motion of a payload in the gravitational field of a source moving with constant velocity.’ Above a certain critical velocity, Felber believes, any mass...