Space

For its trip to Mars, NASA wants haikus like this, Why? Because it's cool.

That's pretty much the gist of this whole story, actually. Maybe I should start composing all stories in the form of a haiku to save us all time.

It's no joke, though, that NASA really is collecting submissions of three-line poems from the public to send into space aboard the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft, which will launch later this year for a mission to study the Red Planet's atmosphere.… Read more

The near miss that happened with a high-tech telescope orbiting the Earth last month was so dramatic that I have to assume Hollywood thrill makers will soon be calling up NASA project scientist Julie McEnery to get all the details and begin determining how feasible it is to jam Ben Affleck or Morgan Freeman into the story line.

McEnery works with NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, which has the mission of mapping the highest-energy light in the universe. On March 29, McEnery learned that Fermi and a dead Russian spy satellite, Cosmos 1805, were speeding toward the same point in space on nearly perpendicular orbits. They would miss being in that same place at the same time by only 30 milliseconds, likely passing within about 700 feet of each other.… Read more

NASA released the most detailed images ever seen of a gigantic hurricane that scientists believe has existed at Saturn's north pole for years.

NASA's Cassini spacecraft snapped the spectacular pictures this past November from a vantage point approximately 261,000 miles from Saturn -- a distance so extreme that the above picture has an image scale of about 1 mile per pixel.… Read more

If you've got $200,000 to spend on a ticket to suborbital space, your spaceship is nearly ready.

Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo, billed as the world's first commercial space plane, notched an important milestone today by firing its rocket engine during flight for the first time.

The test at Mojave Air and Space Port in California saw the passenger space plane detach from its dual-hull mothership, WhiteKnightTwo, at an altitude of 47,000 feet while being piloted by Mark Stucky and Mike Alsbury of builder Scaled Composites.

The pair then ignited the rocket motor, which propelled the craft up to 55,000 feet. During the 16-second engine burn, SpaceShipTwo went supersonic, hitting Mach 1.2. … Read more

It may be more than 40 years since NASA last put a man on the moon, but those Apollo missions continue to serve as a driving force for some aspiring engineers.

On Friday and Saturday, the space agency hosted its 20th annual Great Moonbuggy Race. For these competitions, entrants from colleges and high schools have to to design, build, and race lightweight, human-powered vehicles -- think pedicabs on steroids -- that a pair of riders then must muscle over a half-mile course designed to simulate the lunar surface. NASA says that the "race teams face many of the same … Read more

(CBS News) The question "Is anybody out there?" grows more tantalizing with the discovery of each new far-off planet. Barry Petersen has been talking to scientists searching for clues...

Starry nights inspire wonder, and wondering: Is there life out there?

So how fitting that, in March 2009, NASA launched the planet-hunting telescope Kepler into the night sky.

Look up tonight at the constellation Cygnus -- also known as the Northern Cross -- and up in that one slice of sky is where Kepler has been scanning 150,000 stars every 30 minutes for the last four years.

Natalie … Read more

We've always been told not to stare at the sun, but NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) has been doing just that for the last three years. Since it started operations, the SDO has taken a shot of the sun using its Atmospheric Imaging Assembly every 12 seconds on 10 different wavelengths, giving scientists an unprecedented look at the shifting moods and surface of our nearest star.

NASA put together a 3-minute video of the sun's last three years and set it to lovely music. The result is a yellow, fluctuating, spinning globe, spitting out flares over time. It's nearly hypnotizing.… Read more

Comet ISON, discovered in September of last year by Russian Vitali Nevski, is headed in our direction. And although the sungrazing comet is still more than 394 million miles away (a little closer than Jupiter's current orbit), NASA's Hubble telescope managed to capture an amazing photograph on April 10.

NASA believes that when ISON is at its closest point to the sun on November 28 of this year, it will briefly become brighter than the moon in the sky, making it a serious contender for "comet of the century."

Currently, the comet is headed toward the sun at a speed of around 47,000 miles per hour and has a dusty head of around 3,100 miles wide (about 1.2 times the width of Australia). Its tail trails more than 57,000 miles behind. And yet, the core of the comet's head is tiny -- no more than around 3 to 4 miles across. … Read more

Last month at SXSW, SpaceX founder Elon Musk showed off a video of the SpaceX Grasshopper rocket rising 24 stories into the air and returning safely back to the ground. For a vehicle that is 10 stories high, that's pretty good, but not enough to make your jaw drop.

This creation is called the Grasshopper Vertical Takeoff Vertical Landing (VTVL) vehicle. It's so named because of its nifty parlor trick of being able to blast off vertically and then land upright. Now, the company has tripled the distance of the previous attempt and released a new video showing off the rocket's capabilities. … Read more