Space

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla.--Running a day late because of a ruptured water main, the shuttle Discovery was hauled from its processing hangar to the Vehicle Assembly Building Thursday for attachment to an external tank and twin solid-fuel boosters. If all goes well, the orbiter will be moved to launch pad 39A on September 21, setting the stage for launch November 1 on a space station resupply mission.

It will be the shuttle program's 133rd flight and the 39th and final voyage of Discovery before NASA's oldest shuttle is retired and put on public display, most likely at … Read more

NASA is capitalizing on the success of the iPad with a new app that offers mission information, photos, videos, and factoids.

Dubbed NASA App HD, the program is an updated version of the iPhone app the organization already offers. It includes thousands of images from the NASA picture bank, as well as videos documenting NASA's efforts. Folks who spend time watching NASA TV will be happy to hear that the app runs a live stream of the channel. And those who want to find out about NASA missions can do so from within the software.

NASA App HD also … Read more

We know it's hot up there, but NASA wants to know a bit more about the sun and its atmosphere. And so sometime before 2018, the agency intends to send a spacecraft into the solar atmosphere.

This will mark the first time that a spacecraft from Earth will actually visit a star.

The decision to chart a mission to the sun also realizes a dream that astronomers almost realized a half century ago, when the National Academy of Science's "Simpson Committee" in 1958 recommended a probe to investigate. Several studies were subsequently carried out to test … Read more

Locked in a massive horizontal test fixture near Promontory, Utah, a huge five-segment solid-fuel booster roared to life with a torrent of flame Tuesday, generating some 3.6 million pounds of thrust in a ground-shaking $75 million test of a rocket the Obama administration wants to cancel.

With engineers and spectators looking on from a safe distance, Alliant Techsystems' Development Motor No. 2, or DM-2, ignited at 8:27 a.m. PDT, blasting out a 600-foot-long jet of 5,600-degree flame and billowing clouds of exhaust as it consumed 1.3 million pounds of solid propellant.

Unlike the first five-segment … Read more

NASA is now providing images detailing its early years on Flickr's Commons archive, the space agency announced on Monday.

NASA's new Commons page displays nearly 200 photos taken throughout the venerable organization's early history. They're arranged in three photo sets, including "Building NASA," "Launch/Takeoff," and "NASA Center Namesakes."

The photos available on Flickr aren't available exclusively on that site. In fact, since 2007, NASA has been working with the Internet Archive to display its historic photos. But according to NASA, it decided to bring some of those images … Read more

NASA's Kepler spacecraft, hunting for distant worlds by measuring the slight dimming of starlight as planets pass in front of their parent suns, has found its first multiplanet solar system, researchers announced Thursday.

The Kepler-9 system includes two Saturn-class worlds orbiting in gravitational lockstep close to their star and a possible third planet just a bit larger than Earth that whirls through a hellish "year" in just 1.8 days.

The announcement came just a few days after a European team, using a different technique with a ground-based telescope, revealed the discovery of a solar system with … Read more

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla.--A $2 billion, 7.5-ton physics experiment bound for the International Space Station aboard the last planned shuttle flight in February arrived at the Florida launch site Thursday after a busy summer of work to replace the magnet at the heart of the costly particle detector.

With Nobel laureate Samuel Ting, the lead scientist of the AMS project looking on with shuttle commander Mark Kelly and his crew, an Air Force C-5 transport jet taxied to a stop at the Shuttle Landing Facility after a flight from Geneva where the payload was assembled and tested.

If … Read more

This one is giving Orson Welles' 1938 radio production of The War of the Worlds a good run for its money.

For the seventh consecutive year, phony messages are filling up e-mail inboxes around the world warning that on August 27, Mars will approach Earth and grow to the size of a full moon. "NO ONE ALIVE TODAY WILL EVER SEE THIS AGAIN," the e-mail declares--all in capital letters.

And no, it's not true.

But the Mars hoax has reached such epidemic proportions that NASA saw fit to send out an e-mail late Tuesday night, reminding people … Read more

After six years of painstaking observations, astronomers have identified a distant solar system with at least five Neptune-class worlds orbiting within 130 million miles or so of the parent star--closer than Mars is to the sun. Two other planets are believed to be present, including one just 1.4 times as massive as Earth.

The presumed Earth-size planet orbits a scant 2 million miles from its star, completing a full orbit, or "year," every 1.18 days. If confirmed with additional observations, this hellish world would be the smallest yet discovered, additional proof that Earth-size planets are falling … Read more