It’s only 240,000 miles away, yet this high wilderness still surprises and delights with clues about the origins of the solar system, Earth’s own water, and it even  supplies the occasional brilliant explosion. If you’ve been paying attention recently you’ll have noticed that the Moon is getting a lot of press. One reason is that [...]

From atmospheric changes, to timelapse imagery from Google Earth…our planetary presence is hard to miss. This past week has seen the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in Earth’s atmosphere reach a level of 400 parts-per-million, a value the planet hasn’t seen since several million years ago. To put this into some kind of context let’s [...]

It happens every year around now, and this year should peak on May 5th at approximately 9pm EDT (in the wee hours of May 6th if you’re on GMT). Little pieces of material that once belonged to the nucleus of Halley’s Comet will zip into our atmosphere as meteors. The Eta Aquarids (so-called because the [...]

A new study estimates that 80 to 90 percent of the atmospheric water vapor originating from Earth’s continents comes from plant transpiration rather than simple physical evaporation. This process uses up almost half of the solar energy absorbed by our landmasses and represents a major piece of our terrestrial climate system. There may be implications [...]

Optimistic visions of a human future in space seem to have given way to a confusing mix of possibilities, maybes, ifs, and buts. It’s not just the fault of governments and space agencies, basic physics is in part the culprit. Hoisting mass away from Earth is tremendously difficult, and thus far in fifty years we’ve [...]

NASA produces a lot of great visual material, including some slick inspirational videos. But as a federal agency it can’t legally purchase air time to put this material in front of TV or movie-going audiences. Enter a crowdfunded effort to place ‘We Are The Explorers’ as a trailer to the upcoming Star Trek movie ‘Into [...]

Recent debates over whether or not the Voyager 1 spacecraft has ‘left the solar system’ typically leave out some critical details. The limits of the Sun’s particle radiation is not the physical edge of the contents of the solar system, but it is the point of changeover to the exceedingly tenuous atmosphere of matter and [...]

                      Grasping for an understanding of the true scale of the cosmos is a vital part of how we try to conceptualize reality and our place among it all. But it’s tremendously difficult, whether we’re seeking that ‘oh wow’ moment, or trying to gain intuition [...]

New analysis of data taken by the Cassini mission during its encounter with Jupiter in 2000 reveal that exceptionally clear atmospheric ‘hotspots’ effectively ride up and down in the Jovian skies as they are formed by what’s known as a Rossby wave – a phenomenon familiar to us here on Earth. The authors of the [...]

Using cutting edge techniques, a team of astronomers has directly imaged a distant system of four planets, and made history by obtaining simultaneous spectra of these worlds. This first comparative look reveals that the objects each have distinct atmospheric compositions, none of which directly match any previously known class of astrophysical body.     Only [...]