Space

Streaking through space at 5 miles per second, the International Space Station is the largest satellite ever built, massing 670,000 pounds and stretching 357 feet--longer than a football field--from one end of its main solar power truss to the other.

An hour or two before sunrise and after sunset, when you are in Earth's shadow and the space station--orbiting 220 miles up--is still illuminated by the sun, the ISS outshines Jupiter and rivals Venus as it sails across the sky.

The space station is by far the easiest satellite to see--it's impossible to miss if you're … Read more

The Hubble Space Telescope, still undergoing tests and checkout after a May shuttle servicing mission, snapped a dramatic photo of Jupiter this week showing the atmospheric disturbance left behind after a presumed comet or icy asteroid crashed into the giant planet.

The photograph, taken by the new Wide Field Camera 3, is the first science observation released from Hubble since the telescope was upgraded and repaired.

"The details seen in the Hubble view shows lumpiness in the debris plume caused by turbulence in Jupiter's atmosphere," NASA said in a statement. "The impactor is estimated to be … Read more

SUPERIOR, Colo.--If you remember the scene from Pixar's "Wall-E," in which a rocket ship on its way to humankind's space station blasts through a debris field of abandoned satellites, you may have wondered if anyone on Earth is working to prevent that from becoming reality.

The answer is yes.

Here in this small town not far from Boulder, Colo., the Secure World Foundation (SWF), a nonprofit unassociated with any government, is thinking about that kind of issue, as well as several others related to the fair use of space, and succeeding at getting its analysis … Read more

Speaking of the eclipse, an inventor named David Kent Jones wants to use robots to turn the Earth's only natural satellite into a giant ad.

Jones' scheme is to use lunar robots to plow moon dust into "logos, domains [sic] names, memorials or even portraits...You can even carve your initials in a heart to impress your sweetheart."

Imagine looking up and seeing a Nike swoosh among the stars.

A Salt Lake City company called Moon Publicity says its Shadow Shaping Technology would involve robots pushing the dust into furrows to create shadows that form images when … Read more

JOHNSON SPACE CENTER, Houston--Guy Laliberté, a former street entertainer who founded the enormously successful Cirque du Soleil, says he doesn't plan any fire eating or stilt walking aboard the International Space Station when he visits this fall.

But he might try to teach his crewmates a few card tricks if he can figure out how to do it in weightlessness.

"Take out the fire part!" he laughed during a news conference Thursday at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. "I think this is out of the question by far. The stilts, I don't know … Read more

JOHNSON SPACE CENTER, Houston--NASA managers terminated a spacewalk Wednesday when carbon dioxide levels in astronaut Chris Cassidy's spacesuit began climbing due to a malfunction in its CO2 removal system. NASA managers said later the CO2 levels never exceeded normal limits for crews inside the space station or the shuttle and that calling off the spacewalk early was simply a precaution.

"A spacesuit is a very small spacecraft and there's really not very much margin for error," said space station Flight Director Holly Ridings.

She said Cassidy, a former Navy SEAL making his first spacewalk, experienced no … Read more

During a Twitter/YouTube question-and-answer session aboard the International Space Station on Tuesday, members of the shuttle Endeavour's crew fielded a variety of enquiries about life in orbit, including one that shed new light on the rigors of spacewalking.

"Hi, I'm Dawn from Indianapolis, Indiana, and my question is if you're in a spacesuit, especially out on an EVA and you have to sneeze, how do you deal with that? Especially if it splatters," one viewer asked in a video message uplinked to the astronauts. "Second part, if your nose itches while you're … Read more

New NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, a respected former shuttle commander and retired Marine Corps major general, said Tuesday he's confident an ongoing presidential review of NASA's manned space program will not result in changes that would lengthen the projected five-year gap between the end of shuttle operations and the debut of a new rocket system to replace it.

While he would not say what sort of rocket system he favors--NASA's current Ares program or some alternative--Bolden said review Chairman Norman Augustine understands the critical need to replace the shuttle as soon as possible to minimize reliance on … Read more

An unseen comet or possibly an icy asteroid apparently crashed into Jupiter's atmosphere near the giant planet's south pole sometime during the last few days, creating a "gargantuan" blemish easily visible from Earth.

The presumed impact, discovered by Australian amateur astronomer Anthony Wesley July 19 and confirmed by NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility at Mauna Kea, Hawaii, came almost 15 years to the day after multiple fragments of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 crashed into Jupiter in 1994.

"We're not sure how large this fragment could have been," Leigh Fletcher, a researcher at the Jet … Read more