Of all the spacecraft humans have launched, there have been some impressively fast movers. But which holds the record? It’s not an entirely idle question. Apart from the wow factor, it’s an interesting yardstick for gauging our capacity to explore the cosmos, from familiar planets to the icy depths of space. However, as I quickly [...]

Have you ever wondered what it would really be like for a person to journey to a truly distant and alien place; another planet, even another planetary system? What kind of things would we first see through our windows, or our cameras? What would our sensory experience be in such a distant realm? Would we [...]

This, I guarantee, is a view of NASA’s Curiosity rover embarking on its 250 day trip to Mars that you may not have seen before. It’s an extraordinary piece of time-lapse footage taken from Australia not long after launch from Cape Canaveral. It shows a glowing plume from the Centaur stage after a burn over [...]

Starting this Saturday, a 24 day window of opportunity opens for the launch of NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory, now also known as the Curiosity rover. If all goes well (very well) then in August 2012 a new visitor will barrel down into the martian atmosphere through a six-and-a-half minute maneuver involving hypersonic speeds, air-braking, parachutes, [...]