All six Pratt Whitney Rocketdyne space shuttle main engines from Endeavour’s STS-134 and Atlantis’ STS-135 missions sit in test cells inside the Engine Shop at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. For the first time, all 15 shuttle main engines are …
Wrik Sen: Buying top end audio equipment is one thing, but that piece
of equipment being as expensive as your house is a whole new dimension
altogether. OneDof (One degree of Freedom) turntable, designed by NASA award
winning engineer Aleks Bakman, apart from a n
The Carina Nebula is a star-forming region in the Sagittarius-Carina arm of the Milky Way that is 7,500 light years from Earth and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory has detected more than 14,000 stars in the region. Chandra’s X-ray vision provides strong e…
NASA has been flirting with a number of private firms in the hunt for a company that could offer the U.S. an option in getting its astronauts back into space by the end of 2016. It looks like one such company will be ready for a test flight by as early…
Looking like a pair of eyeglasses only a rock star would wear, this nebula brings into focus a murky region of star formation. NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope exposes the depths of this dusty nebula with its infrared vision, showing stellar infants that…
They say flying is the safest form of transportation, but it is also a big-time contributor to global emissions. Now I’m not saying electric airplanes are going to take over the sky anytime soon, but the winner of NASA’s Green Flight Challenge did manage to fly an electric airplane 200 miles in under two miles, using the equivalent of half a gallon of gasoline per passenger.
Today we can all breathe a little easier thanks to a new survey of near-earth asteroids by NASA’s Wide-field Infared Survey Explorer (WISE). After a year of scanning the celestial sky with infrared light between January 2010 and February 2011, the stud…
Gene Kranz (foreground, back to camera), an Apollo 13 Flight Director, watches Apollo 13 astronaut and lunar module pilot Fred Haise onscreen in the Mission Operations Control Room, during the mission’s fourth television transmission on the evening of …
In a report estimating the hypothetical cost of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 launch vehicle for a government agency, NASA looked at it from two angles: the agency’s traditional approach, and a “more commercial” one. Guess what won?
As NASA looks to other worlds, China’s orbital space program is just heating up: just today they launched the Tiangong 1 space station module, the first step to them getting their own space station in orbit.
This image from 2008 shows NASA’s J-2X engine. NASA conducted a 40-second test of the J-2X rocket engine Sept. 28, the most recent in a series of tests of the next-generation engine selected as part of the Space Launch System architecture that will onc…
According to the latest update from NASA, that out of control satellite we’ve had our eye on will almost certainly make its reentry tonight, and NASA has a guess as to where it’s going to land. Update after the jump.
Photographed by the Expedition 28 crew aboard the International Space Station, this image shows the moon, the Earth’s only natural satellite, at center with the limb of Earth near the bottom transitioning into the orange-colored troposphere, the lowest…
The Orion MPCV ground test vehicle is lifted into the acoustic chamber at Lockheed Martin’s facilities near Denver on Thursday, Sept. 15, 2011, in preparation for the Launch Abort Vehicle Configuration Test. For this test, the MPCV, or multi-purpose …
A quintet of Saturn’s moons come together in the Cassini spacecraft’s field of view for this portrait. Janus (179 kilometers, or 111 miles across) is on the far left. Pandora (81 kilometers, or 50 miles across) orbits between the A ring and the thin F …
In this image taken in 1944, one of Langley Research Center’s Sikorsky YR-4B/HNS-1 helicopters is seen in the 30 x 60 Full Scale Tunnel. A technician sets up camera equipment for stop-action rotor-blade photos. The Sikorsky Company built hundreds of R-…
Using a digital still camera, the International Space Station Expedition Three crew captured a setting sun and the thin blue airglow line at Earth’s horizon. Some of the station’s components are silhouetted in the foreground. This image was taken on Se…
The Dawn spacecraft has only been orbiting Vesta for a few months now, but it’s been taking scads of pictures and streaming them straight back to Earth. Among the highlights are these spectacular oblique images of the asteroid’s dramatic topography, sh…
The Soyuz TMA-21 spacecraft is seen as it lands with Expedition 28 Commander Andrey Borisenko, and Flight Engineers Ron Garan, and Alexander Samokutyaev in a remote area outside of the town of Zhezkazgan, Kazakhstan, on Friday, Sept. 16, 2011. NASA Ast…
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but a major NASA project is years behind schedule, billions over budget, and at serious risk of cancellation. A new appropriations bill might give the James Webb Space Telescope enough money to get it off the gr…
The Herschel Infrared Space Observatory discovered that galaxies do not always need to collide with each other to drive vigorous star birth. The finding overturns a long-held assumption and paints a more stately picture of how galaxies evolve. The new …
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