nasa

The first American manned spacecraft to reach orbit in the wake of the shuttle's retirement will be crewed by company test pilots -- not NASA astronauts -- in part to give space agency managers better insight into flight readiness and safety, officials said Wednesday.

Assuming NASA gets the funding that managers say they need -- a big "if" in today's political environment -- Space Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, hopes to launch a manned version of its Dragon cargo ship in the mid 2015 time frame, followed by a crewed flight to the International Space Station later … Read more

What if the Red Planet weren't always in that constant state of blushing? Kevin Gill, a software engineer who also re-engineers planets every now and then, imagines Mars might long ago have looked quite a bit more like the aqua-green marble we call home.

To create the above image, Gill used data from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), picked an arbitrary sea level, and used a script to cover all the surfaces of Mars below that line with a nice shade of royal blue. From there, Gill writes on Google+ that it was a combination of some earthly … Read more

If you're heading to the International Space Station, try to bunk in the Japanese section. It's as quiet as a Zen temple.

Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield recently went aboard the ISS and has been recording what it sounds like. It's not quite the elegant "2001: A Space Odyssey" experience you might expect. It's more like a noisy tin can.

After recording last week the ambient sounds of the U.S. lab, with its noisy air pumps and fans, Hadfield managed to get samples of what the ISS toilet sounds like, as well as the relative serenity of the Japanese Experiment Module (aka Kibo). … Read more

We already know how to explore planets with relatively low gravity, like Mars. The Curiosity Rover is engineered to hang onto the planet's surface, despite it having just 38 percent of the gravity we enjoy on Earth. What happens if you want to check out a small moon or an asteroid with a fraction of that gravity? You design a robotic hedgehog, of course.

Stanford University researchers and NASA are working together on spiky space balls that could dance across the surfaces of moons and asteroids whose low gravity and rough surfaces would bog down a regular rover. … Read more

The moon could have some serious competition in 2013.

No, we're not finally building a real Death Star, no matter how much the American people demand one. I'm talking about a surprise visit from a recently discovered heavenly body known as the comet Ison. The chunk of ice and rock has likely broken free from the Oort cloud and is heading our way right now. If it survives the journey, astronomers say it could become even brighter than our lunar neighbor in the night sky as it makes a pass through our neighborhood next fall.

According to NASA, the wayward comet is currently hurtling toward the sun somewhere in the vicinity of Jupiter's orbit. By October, it should come very near Mars, possibly allowing NASA's rovers a view as it shakes its tail in their direction. From there, it appears it will continue toward the center of the solar system, passing within a single solar diameter of the sun's surface before heading back more or less the way it came. … Read more

The Mars Curiosity rover recently detected signs of organic compounds on the Red Planet, but NASA won't call the findings definitive. One holdup is the issue of contamination. The trace amounts may be the result of contamination from the rover itself.

The contamination issue could rear its head again should the rover or future expeditions turn up any microbes. Finding microbes on Mars would be a cause for scientific celebration, but a study published in "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America" shows that Earth microbes could very well survive in the brutal conditions on Mars.… Read more

Around 2015, NASA plans to incorporate a spacesuit that amusingly looks like the one worn by Buzz Lightyear in "Toy Story" -- sans the shiny laser beam.

Before you laugh, know that these new digs aren't toy dressings; the Z-1 NASA spacesuit offers a plethora of advantages compared with the space agency's previous designs. Think of it as the baseline architecture for future NASA spacesuits. … Read more

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On this week's show, we check out Tailly, a wearable robotic tail that wags when you get excited. If that gets you wagging, then you'll definitely want to have a look at the Satis Bluetooth toilet that can flush with your smartphone. And in honor of winter, we look at how a snowflake is born. It's the last show of 2012, and we bid you farewell until the new year. The show returns on January 18. … Read more

Braving Arctic temperatures and a brutal wind chill, a Russian Soyuz spacecraft roared to life and streaked smoothly into orbit today, carrying a veteran three-man crew on a two-day flight to the International Space Station.

With commander Roman Romanenko at the controls, the Soyuz TMA-07M spacecraft climbed away from its launching stand at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 7:12 a.m. ET (6:12 p.m. local time), roughly the moment Earth's rotation carried the pad into the plane of the space station's orbit.

Trailing a fiery jet of brilliant orange exhaust, the workhorse rocket arced … Read more