NASA JPL has a great new site that chronicles the missions and chocks up a tally of new planets being found, almost daily. (Visit http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/ for more details.) The Spitzer space telescope (SIRTF) keeps on providing great infrared imagery as it runs out of coolant and enters the “warm” part of its mission (visit website). [...]

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The NASA Kepler Mission ejects its dust cover, in this April 7 artist’s rendition. “The cover released and flew away exactly as we designed it to do,” said Kepler Project Manager James Fanson of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. “This is a critical step toward answering a question that has come down to us [...]

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Did you see that? An atom bomb. Pretty amazing, huh? So you think humans are hot shit, don’t you? Oooh, la la…. We have the bomb. Well, it ain’t nothing compared to the real thing. Nature trumps our puny attempts at power with something so freakin’ amazing that it makes us look like amateurs. You [...]

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This image by the Cassini team of Saturn’s moon Enceladus is simply amazing. All I can do is post it. Click on the image to go to the CICLOPS website for details on this and other images from the Cassini mission.

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Stephen Hawking: Both the LHC and the Space program are vital if the human race is not to stultify and eventually die out. Together they cost less than one tenth of a per cent of world GDP. If the human race can not afford this, then it doesn’t deserve the epithet “human”.

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Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer, has a good article with a link to the NASA website with image archives. There are a LOT OF PROBES currently out and about in the Solar System, and many of them are from NASA. The European Space Agency also has an image archive here. It is really really a [...]

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It will be a long time before humans in any numbers visit or spend extended periods of time on Mars, but we are working to put men back on the moon and keep them there. The moon will be a first step to manned exploration of the solar system, and in the coming years we [...]

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Space is big… I mean really, really huge, but the places where you can put satellites in orbit around the earth are limited. See the picture below from the European Space Agency. We have put some 6000 satellites in orbit in the past four decades, and generated a lot of space junk. Something like tens [...]

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We used to have a non politically correct joke about the Polish when I was in maybe the fifth grade. We joked that they would be the first country to launch a mission to land on the sun. Well, I am more mature now, and at a loss as to why we even picked on [...]

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NASA posted a new image that best represents what astronomers believe the Milky Way galaxy looks like. This was presented at the AAS meeting in St. Louis last week. The Milky Way is not a perfect spiral galaxy, but more of a barred spiral, indicating a possible collision with another small galaxy sometime in its [...]

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