Over the years we’ve sent a lot of stuff into space. Most of that has been spacecraft sent out to explore the solar system — the moon and sun, planets and asteroids. With Voyager poised on the edge of the sun’s influence, we’ll eventually be able to add a tiny pocket of interstellar space to [...]

I spent this afternoon at a workshop on Rapid Media Prototyping, as part of ScienceOnline 2013 in Raleigh, North Carolina. So in the spirit of the session here is a rough and ready thing that I made… It’s a timeline of photos taken by both Voyager spacecraft on their trip through the outer solar system [...]

Remember when I said back in October that Voyager 1 might have finally left the solar system? Well, it turns out that the spacecraft, which has been skirting the edge of the solar system for a long time now, is finding it difficult to say goodbye. According to scientists working on the mission, Voyager 1 [...]

It was on my first birthday that the Voyager 1 spacecraft turned around and took a picture of the pale blue dot we call home. That picture was Voyager’s last glimpse of Earth before its camera was switched off and it began to sail, uninterrupted, towards interstellar space. Around the same time Voyager 2 finished [...]

Most people are familiar with the pale blue dot image of Earth taken by Voyager in 1990. Its blueness is significant, of course, because it is Earth’s abundant liquid water that makes it look that way. But if you looked at the light that is reflected from Earth carefully, you would see several interesting features. [...]

On its 35th birthday, the Voyager 1 spacecraft is a little closer to home than we had hoped it would be at this point. The Voyagers, 1 and 2, are right at this moment speeding away from us towards interstellar space. But a paper out in Nature today reports that, despite recently showing signs that [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

A speculative but intriguing discussion that sometimes crops up when talking to people engaged in exoplanetary science goes like this; let’s suppose that we find an unmistakably terrestrial style planet around a relatively nearby star (less than about 30 light years away), perhaps even around one of the Alpha Centauri members, a touch over four [...]

Where are all the space-art bloggers?  When Symbiartic was in the planning stages, this was a post I knew I had to write. There are so few I found it at first surprising.  Do the images from the Hubble trump inspiration in painters?  Is interest in space waning compared to say, paleontology? Science inspired art [...]

Story 5 Astronauts from five different space agencies are participating in the CAVES project, an underground training exercise beneath the island of Sardinia. Links: Astronauts Heading Deep Underground for Spaceflight Training Story 4 Scientists have discovered a two-star solar system orbited by two planets, an astronomical first. Links: Two Alien Planets Found with Twin Suns [...]