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April 17, 2014 Andy Cush

Above is an artist’s rendering of Kepler-186f, the first Earth-sized planet discovered in a star’s “habitable zone” — the range at which a planet could contain liquid water. Astronomers using NASA’s Kepler telescope found the planet in the constellation Cygnus, 500 lightyears from Earth, and believe it has a rocky surface. “We know of just one planet […]

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April 12, 2014 Bucky Turco

NASA astronaut Rick Mastracchio is currently swirling around the Earth aboard the International Space Station and on Friday afternoon, he posted a stunning photo of the East Coast on Twitter that makes even Long Island look enchanting. (Photo: @AstroRM) […]

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April 4, 2014 Andy Cush

On Tuesday, Bonhams New York is hosting an auction of “space history” items, including an Apollo 11 Mission Patch, an American flag that almost made it to the moon, and a casting of Buzz Aldrin’s boot. If you’ve got a couple thousand dollars to spare, you could do worse than this signed Apollo 10 Snoopy toy. […]

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March 25, 2014 Andy Cush

The last time NASA rolled out a new spacesuit, it was the Z-1, a prototype that looked like exactly like Buzz Lightyear. Now, the space agency is pursuing its sucessor, the Z-2, by asking the public to vote on one of three designs. All three are batshit crazy. There’s “Trends in Society,” above, a suit […]

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February 25, 2014 Andy Cush

That vast swath of darkness at the center of the above image, looking like a speckled, oddly shaped body of water — that’s the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, photographed from the International Space Station on January 30th. NASA has some relevant landmarks labeled for context. It’s a striking reminder of how literally and figuratively […]

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February 18, 2014 Bucky Turco

NASA’s Opportunity rover is currently traipsing around Mars and every now and then, it discovers something temporarily unexplainable. Last month, the space agency published an image of a rock that seemed to mysteriously appear on the Martian surface. “It looks like a jelly donut,” said Steve Squyres, head scientist on the rover project. And it […]

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February 7, 2014 Andy Cush

Yesterday, we saw a truly beautiful panorama of shots taken by the Mars Curiosity rover showing the vast, foreign landscape that is the Red Planet’s surface. Today, the curiosity offered a distinctly different view, sending home its first-ever photo of Earth taken from Mars. The view is breathtaking. Witness our planet in all its tiny, speck-like […]

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February 6, 2014 Andy Cush

The sheer amount of snow and sleet in recent weeks has left parts of NYC looking like the cratered surface of some distant planet. If you’d rather be looking at foreboding, interminably chilly tundras from afar, though, here’s a new panorama of images from NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover, stitched together by the photographer Andrew Bodrov. According […]

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October 7, 2013 Andy Cush

Last week we brought you the sad news that despite the millions and millions of miles between it and the Capitol Building, the Mars Curiosity rover couldn’t be saved from the federal shutdown, and is currently operating on standby. Fortunately, there’s hope for our Mars efforts yet: the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution probe (MAVEN), which […]

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October 2, 2013 Bucky Turco

Fox News published a story on its website Monday about the government shutdown that reeks of The Onion. “How to visit national parks during the partial gov’t shutdown,” reads the headline. And then they go there: National parks were not exempt from the government shutdown but that does not mean you can’t ‘visit’ the nation’s […]

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