‘Jade Rabbit’ is on the Moon
At 1.11pm UTC today (8.11 am EST) the Chang’e-3 mission made a successful soft landing in an area toward the edge of the Sinus Iridum and Mare Imbrium – shown in this image by the red flag...
Life, Unbounded
Discussion and news about planets, exoplanets, and astrobiology
Extraordinary Footage From Starship Juno
A starship comes tearing through the solar system, its sensors capturing a brief glimpse of the inner planets. A small blue-green world spins while its tiny dark moon gyrates around it.
4 Billion Years of Martian History in 2 Minutes
In honor of a slew of new results coming from NASA’s Curiosity rover, here’s a two-minute simulation of our current best-bet for how the martian environment has evolved over the past 4 billion years...
To Jupiter
On October 9th, 2013, NASA’s Juno mission completed an Earth ‘flyby’ to gain a little extra velocity (a gravitational slingshot maneuver that steals a tiny bit of Earth’s momentum) to get it to Jupiter in 2016...
Krugman’s Theory of Interstellar Trade
Everyone needs a little light relief sometimes, including the Nobel winning economist and writer/blogger extraordinaire Paul Krugman. A few months back he reminded the world of a short paper he’d written some years ago on the rather unexpected topic of interstellar finance...
Don’t Panic, It’s Just a Solar Field Reversal!
At any moment the great cocoon of unseen magnetic fields and particle radiation that surrounds Earth and all other major planets is going to experience a change of polarity
The Great Martian Storm of ’71
On November 14th 1971 NASA’s Mariner 9 became the first spacecraft to successfully orbit another planet...
Astrobiology Roundup
Lots of new scientific results in the past couple of weeks feed directly into the central questions of astrobiology – from the search for life, to the environment of interplanetary and interstellar space, and the grand cosmological terrain we find ourselves in...
The Moon Is Not Black And White, It Just Looks That Way
Hands up if you think about the Moon in black and white? Yes – well, you’re not alone, and there’s actually good reason for you to, because the surface of the Moon is nearly devoid of strong colors in comparison to what we’re used to here on Earth...
Voyager Has Entered The Interstellar Medium
After many claims and statements over the past few years that Voyager 1, our most distant operating spacecraft, has ‘left the solar system’ (it hasn’t, as I explain here), it does now seem that as of August 2012 this extraordinary vehicle has entered the interstellar medium...
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