ASTRONOMY

One Company's Bold Plan to Mine Asteroids

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

A Sun-Like Star Very Close to Us Might Have a Goldilocks Planet

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

GALAXY: A Party That Combines Art, Science, Technology, and Storytelling

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

On Its Way to Interstellar Space, Voyager 1 Explores the Magnetic Highway

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

Why Does the Moon Sometimes Look Huge?

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

How Curiosity Snapped Its Incredible Self-Portrait

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

How NASA is Preparing to Visit and/or Destroy Asteroids

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

11 Moons You Should Get to Know

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

What's Happening on Saturn's Moons?

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

What Is Greenwich Mean Time?

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

The Expanding Universe: How the Universe Got Bigger As We Measured It

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

11 Weird and Wonderful Webcams

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

The Blue Marble: Views of Earth From Far Away

In January 2012, the newly launched weather satellite NPP Suomi had gathered enough swaths of data to cover the entire Earth. To commemorate this, the mission team assembled this into a map and projected it over the

Recovering NASA History in an Abandoned McDonald's

In 1966, NASA's Lunar Orbiter program performed a detailed survey of the moon's surface. The Orbiters mapped the moon in exquisite detail, searching for suitable places that later missions could use as landing sites. The Orbiters sent back their data vi

The Arecibo Message

Let's say you're a human with a big radio transmitter, who wants to send a message to the putative aliens out there light-years away, listening by their radio receivers. What would your message say? How would you format it, since you don't have any conc

If We Had No Moon

Check out this article from Astrobiology Magazine, describing how things would be different if we lacked the moon. Here's a

Harvard's Observatory Going Digital

The New York Times has a lovely article on an effort to digitize the Harvard Observatory's collection. Since the nineteenth century, photographic plates of the night sky have been stored on Observatory Hill on the Harvard campus, representing the history

The Power of Pluto

Okay, I'll admit it: I've been reading a weekly horoscope put out by the astrologers over at astrocenter.com for the last six years or so. They also send me a daily, but I've never found it to be even remotely accurate. The weekly, on the other hand, has

We have not yet emerged from mourning

I've still got the ninth planet galaxy's most famous iceball on the brain today, partially because I can't stop thinking about our fabulous commemorative t-shirt (have you pre-ordered yours yet? email us at tips-at-mentalfloss-com or leave a comment with