Tag: SPACE
An anonymous rich guy in Europe just bought a Cold War era Soviet space craft for 1 million Euros, or $1,390,900. The Vozvrashchayemi Apparat (VA) shuttle was sold in Brussels at the German auction house Lempertz, which usually trades in old paintings, but have taken to the space junk trade. The VA is historically significant for […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
You may be aware that NASA is one of the federal agencies being affected by the government shutdown; 18,000 workers, 97% of NASA’s employees, will not be reporting to work until Congress works out a solution. But perhaps the most notable furlough isn’t even a human: the Curiosity rover, all the way up on Mars, […]
