What’s happening in space, right now!
On March 17th, physicists with the BICEP2 experiment announced they had detected the remnant of gravity waves in the cosmic microwave background, the light left over from the Big Bang.
Since at least the 1960s, astronauts and satellites have been snapping photos of planet Earth from on high. While many of these photos possess an intrinsic beauty, some hold important clues about the goings-on of the inhabitants below.
According to NASA, more than 500,000 pieces of debris are tracked as they orbit earth. Individual pieces can travel at speeds of up to 28,000 kilometers per hour, creating a potentially dangerous situation for both satellites and astronauts alike.
NASA is known for hi-tech wizardry when it comes to spacecraft, but some of its technology has floated back down to earth and made it into products we use everyday.
We’ve put robots on both the moon and mars, but scientists have never tried to soft-land a robot on a comet–until now. In this episode of The Countdown, we cover everything you need to know about the European Space Agency’s groundbreaking Rosetta mission.
What causes the sky near Earth’s poles to light up with swirling, colorful light? In this episode of the Countdown, we explore the physics behind auroras and more.
We rounded up the coolest, biggest and most important space stories of 2013 and asked the editors of Scientific American to vote for their top five.
Could Mars support life? In this episode of The Countdown, we run through five intriguing lines of evidence that the red planet was not always as desolate as it appears, and may even be habitable today.
If you live in the U.S., chances are good you’ll be munching on turkey tomorrow in celebration of Thanksgiving. But millions of miles above your head, Comet ISON will make its closest pass to the sun.
More to explore: Bizarre Asteroid with Six Tails Spotted by Hubble Telescope (Space.com) Liftoff! India’s First Mars Probe Launches Toward the Red Planet (Space.com) Kepler Telescope Finds Plethora of Earth-Size Planets (Scientific American) Chelyabinsk Eyewitnesses Help Scientists Resolve Meteor Mysteries (Scientific American) Gravity Maps Reveal Why the Moon’s Far Side Is Covered with Craters (Nature [...]
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