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May 2018 is the launch window for NASA’s next mission to Mars, the InSight Lander. InSight is the next member of what could be called a fleet of human vehicles destined for Mars. But rather than working on the question of Martian habitability or suitability for life, InSight will try to understand the deeper structure of Mars. InSight stands for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport. InSight will be the first robotic explorer to visit Mars and study the red planet’s deep interior. The work InSight does should answer questions about the formation of Mars, and those...

The comet 46P/Wirtanen, which passes Earth every 5.4 years, was one of three comets discovered by Carl Wirtanen in 1948 at the Lick Observatory in California. This orbit will be one of the closest comet orbits to Earth since the 1950s, according to Space.com. The comet 46P will likely not have a large observable tail because of its relatively small size, according to Space.com. It measures 0.68 miles in diameter, one-tenth the size of the popular Halley's Comet. Currently, 46P is a small blueish object in the night sky. The comet will be passing in the Southern sky, near the...

Making lemonade from lemons, two teams of physicists have used data from misguided satellites to put Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity, the general theory of relativity, to an unexpected test. The opportunistic experiment confirms to unprecedented precision a key prediction of the theory—that time ticks slower near a massive body like Earth than it does farther away. As Einstein explained, gravity arises because massive bodies warp space-time. Free-falling objects follow the straightest possible paths in that curved space-time, which to us appear as the parabolic arc of a thrown ball or the circular or elliptical orbit of a satellite. As...

Heather Mac Donald has written and spoken extensively about how identity politics is hampering America’s ability to maintain its dominance in STEM fields. Our main competitors, most notably China, are focused on making sure the best scientists, mathematicians, and engineers are doing the work. They care nothing about gender. And they spend virtually every dollar related to STEM on hard research and analysis. The U.S., by contrast, is preoccupied with the gender and (to a lesser extent) the race and ethnicity of who is in the lab. And we pour money into promoting identity politics in STEM. Indeed, Elizabeth Harrington...

In linking to my sunspot update this week, there has been a lot of speculation at the climate website WattsUpWithThat that the next solar cycle has begun...which suggested that this sunspot was the first such sunspot this cycle, was not quite accurate however. This sunspot with an opposite polarity, which decayed so quickly that it did not rate getting a sunspot number, was not the first... The grand minimum of the 1600s, dubbed the Maunder Minimum in honor of the scientist who first identified it, was a century where almost no sunspots were visible. There was no apparent solar cycle....

I’m at Vandenberg Air Force Base. My wife and I came to see the launch of Icesat2, a satellite intended to measure the thickness of the polar ice caps. Our son Tony designed the laser altimeters on Icesat, which measure the height above the geoid of the ice, of forests, and other objects. The launch vehicle was a Delta rocket. The Delta was derived from the Air Force’s old Thor missile. This was the last launch of a Delta. It’s now obsolete and being retired. For me, it closed out some personal history. Back in the late ‘fifties, I was...

It’s August, and that means we will have  ☆*¨`*☆StArrY, StArrY NiGhƮs☆*¨`*☆So grab your dog and your camera…and head out to capture some magnificent images under the night sky. The Perseids Meteor shower is at its peak tonight.Photo by Andrew RhodesEnjoy it while you can.Posted from: MOTUS A.D.

The next time asteroids menace the earth, we'll be ready. Because NASA has created a plan. But before you get too excited, unfortunately, NASA's just-released plan does not include a Bruce Willis-led crew of roughnecks landing on an asteroid and blowing it to smithereens with a nuke. Which begs the question, if that's not part of the plan, what's a potential "Space Force" actually for? Yesterday, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy released a report titled, the "National Near-Earth Object Preparedness Strategy and Action Plan." Okay, see, this is the problem with government bloat. That title is...

The solar system just got a bit stranger. As astronomers continue their ongoing quest to find the elusive Planet Nine, a team found a space rock that lends credence to the idea that a huge super-Earth planet really exists in the outer reaches of our solar system. The newfound asteroid, called 2015 BP519, adds to a growing body of evidence about little worlds in the solar system being perturbed by something big. Astronomers detailed its discovery and description in a new paper, adding that its bizarre angle of its orbit gives more weight to the idea that a big planet...

Blue Origin test flight, China's space-program, SLS, earth's magnetic field flipping?

If you simply flew up into space and sawed the moon in half with a giant hacksaw, most likely, nothing would happen. This is because gravitational force would hold the two halves together, sort of like a couple of magnets. But what if you were able to get a couple of giant crowbars and put a person on the other side and then count to 3 and totally separate the two halves of the moon? With enough strength applied, you could theoretically push the two halves far enough apart where the gravitational force no longer pulls them together and now...

"SpaceX launched NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) on Wednesday, April 18 from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida. The launch occurred at 6:51 p.m. EDT, or 22:51 UTC. TESS was deployed into a highly elliptical orbit approximately 49 minutes after launch. Following stage separation, SpaceX successfully landed Falcon 9’s first stage on the “Of Course I Still Love You” drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean.

Astronomer Mark Lacy and colleagues used the Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Chile to observe the universe’s first light, and found evidence of gusts flowing from a type of black hole called a quasar. The wind extends about 228,000 light-years away from the galaxy that surrounds the quasar. Previously, astronomers had seen signs of these winds only about 3,000 light-years from their galaxies.The result, published November 12 at arXiv.org, could help resolve questions about how black holes can grow with their galaxies, or shut galaxies down for good.Black holes are best known for gravitationally gobbling everything that veers too close....

WEST POINT, Va. (WRIC) -- Students and parents in West Point, a town roughly an hour east of Richmond, are rallying behind a teacher put on paid administrative leave following a transgender controversy at the school. A French teacher at West Point High School, Peter Vlaming, is currently on paid administrative leave for not using a student's preferred identity pronoun. 8News reached out to the school for comment but West Point Public Schools cited the incident as "a personnel issue" and declined to respond about the status of Vlaming's case. Students told 8News that Vlaming won't use male pronouns for...

Science Media Still Overwhelmingly Leftist December 5, 2018 | David F. Coppedge Try to find a conservative point of view in the following secular news stories. We found one in the long list. Last week, we illustrated the disease of misconduct and unreliability in Big Science. And yet Big Science and Big Media continue their onslaught against Christian values, conservative politics, and Donald Trump. Here’s a rapid-fire list to prove it; these titanic conglomerates are juggernauts of leftism, not pure-hearted seekers of truth. They stray far outside their domain of natural knowledge into politics, ethics, and philosophy. Can anyone find...

The US military has raised concerns about the mysterious Russian launch They found five orbital bodies leaving the rocket instead of four, as suggested Either rocket's upper stage broke, or Russia had kept part of the launch secret The US military has raised concerns about the mysterious Russian launch after they found five orbital bodies leaving the rocket instead of four, as previously suggested. The US Combined Space Operations Centre (CSpOC) believe that either the rocket's upper stage broke in two, or the Russians had kept part of the launch secret.

A letter written in German by Albert Einstein in 1954 is going under the gavel on Tuesday. Experts at Christie's auction house in New York estimate the so-called "God letter" could sell for up to $1.5 million (€1.3 million). "This remarkably candid, private letter was written a year before Einstein's death and remains the most fully articulated expression of his religious and philosophical views," said Christie's in a statement. The missive is referred to as the "God letter" because it addresses how Einstein felt about the characterization of God and Judaism in a then-recently published book on the subject by...

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft was launched in 2016, but today it will begin to orbit its destination: the asteroid Bennu. When it does, Benniu will break the record for the smallest object ever orbited by a manmade spacecraft. NASA will begin a process of learning more about the small asteroids that reside in our part of the solar system. You can watch the livestream of the arrival here:

Most stars with the mass of the sun or larger have one or more companion stars, but when and how these multiple stars form is one of the controversial central problems of astronomy. Gravity contracts the natal gas and dust in an interstellar cloud until clumps develop that are dense enough to coalesce into stars, but how are multiple stars fashioned? Because the shrinking cloud has a slight spin, a disk (possibly a preplanetary system) eventually forms. In one model of binary star formation, this disk fragments due to gravitational instabilities, producing a second star. The other model argues that...

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is scheduled to rendezvous with its targeted asteroid, Bennu, on Monday, December 3, 2018, at approximately 17:00 UTC (noon EST). Translate UTC to your time. NASA will air a live event from 16:45 to 17:15 UTC (11:45 a.m.to 12:15 p.m. EST) to highlight the arrival of the agency’s first asteroid sample return mission. You can watch on NASA TV, Facebook Live, Ustream, YouTube and NASA Live. NASA TV also will air an arrival preview program starting at 16:15 UTC (11:15 a.m. EST). OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer) launched in September 2016 and has been...