17 Odd Things We've Sent to Space for Some Reason
From the plush dinosaur the SpaceX crew brought aboard to the sandwich John Young smuggled into space, humans have sent some intriguing items into the cosmos.
From the plush dinosaur the SpaceX crew brought aboard to the sandwich John Young smuggled into space, humans have sent some intriguing items into the cosmos.
Eclipses are a pretty amazing sight from our tiny little vantage points on Earth. But what would a lunar eclipse look like from the moon's surface? And what about that strange phenomenon we call a blood moon?
There are so many ways a reboot of Cosmos could have gone wrong.
There are two questions that have haunted wannabe astronomers for decades: “Why is our galaxy called the Milky Way?” and “Does it have anything to do with the delicious candy bar?”
A couple of white dwarfs + space garbage = possible planet formation
A scientific team from Colombia was able to trace back the explosive space rock's origins using "simple trigonometry."
In late 1908, the scientific community in St. Petersburg and Moscow was galvanized by vague reports filtering out of Siberia, telling of a gigantic, mysterious explosion that summer witnessed only by a handful of native Evenki tribesmen and Russian settle
P4 and P5 need new names. How does Cerberus sound? Or Styx?
Brace yourselves for the coming asteroid gold rush. U.S. company Deep Space Industries this week revealed plans to send spacecraft on missions to mine near-Earth asteroids for precious metals. According to the announcement, the company plans to dispatch a
Artist’s impression of the Tau Ceti system. Created by J. Pinfield for the RoPACS network at the University of Hertfordshire, 2012. A bunch of science-fiction stories just got a little bit more feasible: An international team of astronomers recently anno
Do you like art, science, and parties? If you do, you live in Los Angeles, and you have some time tomorrow, you might want to check out GALAXY. Thrown by cARTel: Collaborative Arts LA, the event is billed as a 15,000 square foot "ultimate cosmic playgroun
This image shows NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft exploring a new region in our solar system called the "magnetic highway." Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech When NASA launched its Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft 33 years ago, the probes' primary mission was to expl
Have you ever seen the moon floating above the horizon of your city, and noticed that it looked oddly huge? I sure have. In fact, I've seen the effect in lots of popular media, including that one iconic shot from E.T. and other "supermoon" photos. But
Photo Courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems On October 31, the Mars Curiosity Rover indulged in a tradition honored by party people everywhere: the self-snapped photo, which the rover took in Gale Crater (Mount Sharp, Curiosity's event
So there's this asteroid, 99942 Apophis, that will make a "close approach to" (read: "near miss of") Earth in 2029 and possibly again in 2036. Don't worry, we're probably fine -- there are lots of way more dangerous asteroids coming our way...just not qu
You may have heard already that a fifth moon was discovered orbiting Pluto. (If not, Hubble spotted a fifth moon orbiting Pluto.) We know just enough about P5 to know that it's tiny, and it's a moon. Here are some other wild and wonderful worlds that orbi
This 25-minute film explores what we've learned about Saturn's various moons via space probes. The data comes primarily from NASA's Cassini, though some is from the Voyager and Galileo missions. Nitrogen geysers, bizarre surface ridges, and real atmosph
In south London, at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, it’s possible to walk up to a metal strip running along the ground in a courtyard and, stepping over it with one foot, straddle the world. Suddenly, one half of your body is in the Western Hemisphere a
Since before history began, we have tried to understand our world and our place in it. To the earliest hunter-gatherer tribes, this meant little more than knowing the tribe's territory. But as people began to settle and trade, knowing the wider world beca
In the go-go 90s, the Internet was new and we were all excited about the potential of "webcams," a new technology allowing tiny images, almost-live, to be viewed online. Nearly twenty years after the advent of the technology, the bloom is off the webcam