If you think this star system looks a little crowded, that’s because it contains all of the possible alien worlds found by the Kepler planet-hunting mission so far. This animation made by Alex Parker, a postdoctoral researcher in planetary science at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, shows all 2299 of the most likely planetary candidates [...]

I woke up early on Wednesday morning, half feeling like a kid on Christmas morning, half feeling like I’d rather just stay in bed. While most people in the UK were sound asleep, amateur and professional astronomers alike got up before dawn to witness an astronomical spectacle that won’t happen again until the year 2117: [...]

I’ve been a freelancer for over 20 years. It’s not quite accurate to say there aren’t benefits. There are; they just don’t include health care and employer-matched IRAs. The benefits are such things as not having to use an alarm clock or wear pants everyday, if you don’t feel like it. You can.  But you don’t [...]

CAPE CANAVERAL — I took this picture last night, and I don’t like it very much. Let’s set aside discussions of artistic merit and admit that it’s a pretty dreary view of the last functioning space shuttle perched on its launch pad. Especially when NASA promised a glorious sunset. I’m a 20-something science journalist now [...]

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 [...]

Far from the Sun planetary bodies can hold onto many more moons. The latest count for Pluto is five satellites, and the most recent two need names. Back in 2011 and 2012 it was announced that Hubble Space Telescope observations of the Pluto system had spied first one and then another new candidate moon. For [...]

NASA’s Deep Impact probe has captured images of Comet C/2012 S1 (ISON), as it moves past the orbital distance of Jupiter on what may be its first trip inwards to the Sun, and possibly a spectacular show. Comets are notoriously fickle beasts. Chunks of primordial rock, dust, and volatile ices that formed some 4.5 billion [...]

NASA’s Curiosity rover is preparing to drill for the first time, into what appears to be sedimentary rock criss-crossed by mineral-filled veins.         Back in September last year the Mars Science Laboratory carried by the rover found a rocky outcrop on the wall of Gale Crater that was full of a crusty [...]

On December 17th 2012 two small spacecraft called Ebb and Flow punched into the lunar surface at over 3,700 miles an hour. This ended the year long mission of NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL). The twin spacecraft spent most of this time orbiting the Moon’s surface at a scarily low altitude of about [...]

What would the landscapes of Mars look like under a different light? Getting an accurate visual sense of the rocks and minerals on the martian surface is important for a number of reasons. For science it’s critical that objects are correctly seen, especially in terms of colors. Spectral features help give compounds their optical fingerprints [...]

It’s one thing to spot stuff from orbit above an alien world, quite another to get in close. Earlier Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter imagery of Gale Crater, now home to NASA’s Curiosity rover, had shown signs of what appeared to be something akin to an ‘alluvial fan’ spreading downwards from the crater rim. It was extremely [...]

Ok, so every so often something comes along that just blows away everything you’ve seen before. This is one of those things. Soon after Curiosity made landfall we got to see a glimpse of a low-resolution and highly compressed time-lapse video of the descent, showing the heat-shield fall away and a precipitous drop to the [...]

The clock is ticking and NASA’s Curiosity rover with its burden of the Mars Science Laboratory is heading for a potentially historic landing on Mars. As we all wait to find out what happens, here’s a small look at the landing site. This is Gale Crater, a 150 km (about 90 mile) depression just south [...]

The prolific planet-hunting spacecraft that has already discovered some of the most intriguing exoplanets known has abruptly lost the capacity to carry out its mission, NASA officials announced May 15. NASA’s Kepler spacecraft, which launched in 2009, relies on an array of flywheels, or reaction-wheel assemblies, to stabilize the pointing of its telescope toward a [...]

President Obama has restored science to its rightful place in the White House, says John Holdren, Obama’s senior science advisor. “Science is again where it should be,” he told an audience of 200 as part of a lecture series at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J. on Wednesday, although he warned that the [...]

The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has just released President Obama’s budget request for 2014. It will take some time for the budget’s full impacts on science to be dissected and debated, but here is a quick look at how one closely watched agency—NASA—fared. The president’s budget, which is subject to Congressional [...]

Dissatisfied with the current state of the solar system, NASA is looking to do a little remodeling. The space agency is angling to capture a small asteroid and drag it closer to Earth for human exploration, the Associated Press reported April 6. The Obama administration’s proposed budget for 2014 will include $100 million to kick [...]

Tracking the location of the Voyager 1 spacecraft can be exhausting for a science journalist, and I can only imagine how confusing it gets for the interested reader. The relevant question pertaining to Voyager 1’s location is this: Has the venerable NASA spacecraft exited the heliosphere, the sun’s plasma cocoon in space, and crossed into [...]

As the brash, stylish new kid on the block, SpaceX was sure to win its share of admirers. But last week’s launch hiccup showed that the private space operator, helmed by Elon Musk, has a few issues to work out, just like stodgy old NASA. Don’t get me wrong: SpaceX has done unbelievably impressive things. [...]

Yesterday, a mysterious group called the Inspiration Mars Foundation announced vague plans for a “historic journey to Mars and back in 501 days” scheduled for 2018. The group neglected to mention if the trip would be manned, instead directing the public to a press conference scheduled for February 27. But new information reveals that the [...]

LOS ANGELES—When the Curiosity rover lifted off toward Mars, the spacecraft carried a few stowaways—278,000 bacterial spores, by NASA’s best estimate. That is sparkling clean, by spacecraft standards—the mission’s components had been sterilized, wiped, baked and coddled in clean rooms to drastically reduce the bacterial burden. Mars missions such as Curiosity are subject to strict [...]

LOS ANGELES—There is probably water on Mars, but you wouldn’t want to drink it. It’s salty, viscous and quite possibly toxic. But astrobiologists are nonetheless excited about the possibility. Just in the past few years, orbiter cameras and Mars landers have gathered evidence that watery liquid does exist on the Red Planet, at least during [...]

Sample a hurricane’s air from a plane high in the stratosphere and, in addition to the expected water and grit, you’ll find an abundance of microbes. Swept up from land and sea by the tropical cyclone’s power, the skyborne bacteria persist in the atmosphere for days—and some may even thrive there. A new survey of [...]

There’s a new light in the night sky – and it’s North Dakota. Over the past 2 years, North Dakota has doubled its oil production to become the #2 producing state in the nation.  And with this oil has come a glut of natural gas – so much gas that the more than 150 oil [...]

Greetings, and welcome to Day 4 of Plugged In! On behalf of myself, Melissa, Scott, and Robynne, welcome to this shiny new blog of ours. There are so many things to discuss, but to get started, I want explain to you what this blog means to me and what I hope to get out of [...]

Colonel Chris Hadfield is a Canadian astronaut, a former mission specialist on STS-74 who also performed multiple EVAs on STS-100, and, for a few hours longer, the well-loved commander of the International Space Station mission 35. He has been a great inspiration for space travel via every type of social media (with the assistance of [...]

On January 28, 1986, NASA Challenger mission STS-51-L ended in tragedy when the shuttle exploded 73 seconds after takeoff. The image of the explosion shortly after liftoff is burned into the memory of many of us, so revisiting the “major malfunction” may not be necessary, but is here for those who’d like to witness it [...]

Beautiful. Stunning. Hypnotic. Only a few of the words to describe this video posted by Christoph Malin, an outdoor journalist and cinematographer. And watch, at about 1:42 you’ll see Comet “Lovejoy” rising. From beneath the video: “This Video was achived (sic) by “stacking” image sequences provided by NASA from the Crew at International Space Station. [...]

From Argonne Labs comes this intriguing video demonstrating the acoustic levitation of liquids on a piece of equipment developed for NASA to simulate microgravity conditions. “The acoustic levitator uses two small speakers to generate sound waves at frequencies slightly above the audible range – roughly 22 kilohertz. When the top and bottom speakers are precisely [...]

I stayed up last night to watch the incredible event of the successful landing of Mars Curiosity only a projected 262 meters from planned site at 10:14:39 PDT official touchdown time in order to tweet (and retweet from the space pros and those in attendance of the many NASA social events watching the event) to [...]

Today’s Monday Music Video is not a music video per se, but instead features three songs from a soundtrack to an excellent movie about the Apollo missions. Evoking a sense of weightlessness and other-worldliness is an intuitive goal for most music on videos, movies, and TV programs featuring space and space travel. No one has [...]

Have you ever thought that you had a great idea for an experiment to be done in space? Maybe you’ve hoped your idea could have an audience with Stephen Hawking and astronauts and other luminaries! If you haven’t, you might start considering this today! If you are aged 14-18, the time is now to submit [...]

Science communication has seldom had a better champion than Canadian astronaut Commander Chris Hadfield who just returned to Earth last night. Astronauts tweeting and talking from space is not a new phenomena, and though interesting scientific experiments abound way up on the ISS, they weren’t what caught the public’s imagination this go round. It was [...]

Last month, we posted a wide variety of science-art here at Symbiartic. We thought it’d be nice to post an overview in case you missed or wanted to revisit any. Enjoy!

If you live in the upper latitudes and noticed an awesome aurora last week, behold the cause. Just a few days before the aurora, on August 31st, the sun threw a major tantrum and ejected a large amount of matter into space (sun places thumb to nose and wiggles fingers delivering an emphatic “thbtbtbtbtthtbtbtbtht! So [...]

This week, the space probe Voyager 1 turned 35. In the years since its launch, it completed its mission to document Saturn and Jupiter and has continued on to the brink of our solar system. Now, it is poised to reach farther than any man-made object to date, exiting the solar system and entering the [...]

When Curiosity landed three weeks ago today, many news stories were quick to point out it is the biggest rover to date. They said it’s car-sized. But what does that mean – are we talking a Hummer or a Mini? And how did its predecessors measure up? While snooping around NASA’s Mars mission sites, I [...]

I’m so excited I might burst. The first images from Curiosity’s cameras rained down to Earth in the middle of last night, after a 14 minute journey from the red planet. Here they are, in all their glory. Larger, color images will be available next week. Let the imagination soar!! Other neat tidbits from Curiosity: [...]

This striking portrait of Sally Ride, 1st American woman in space was painted by portrait artist Christopher Paluso for Ride’s 2009 induction into the San Diego Air and Space Museum’s International Hall of Fame. She was the 1st American woman, 1st lesbian in space and at the time, the youngest person in space at the [...]

The Martian rovers Opportunity and Spirit have represented optimism, hope, and even cuteness to millions of people dreaming about discoveries on the red planet. How appropriate then, that the newest rover, Curiosity, should carry a sundial with sentiments and illustrations worthy of classic children’s literature. Curiosity blasted off aboard an Atlas 5 rocket on November [...]

There’s an interesting website that just launched recently that focuses on the infographic. It’s called Visual.ly, and one of its goals is to provide a platform for designers to upload their best infographics and get noticed. It’s an interesting concept that, among other things, makes for a great procrastination tool as you sift through their [...]

In researching the carbon cycle recently, I came across the diagram above illustrating how carbon cycles through the atmosphere and into the ocean, through shells and rock, then magma only to be spewn out as gas into the atmosphere again via volcanoes. I thought it did a nice job of conveying the information, but I [...]

Last weekend, NASA successfully launched the Mars Science Laboratory – called Curiosity, which is currently well on its way towards the red planet. Back in May, I went to an Open House at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena. What a refreshing sight it was to see so many people – couples, families, grandparents and [...]