wyas.org.uk

Students and teachers at the Pinellas County Science Center in St. Petersburg, Fla., will have an out-of-this-world phone conversation with NASA astronauts aboard the International Space Station.

NASA has begun development of a mission to visit and study the sun closer than ever before.

To see what life might be like on a distant planet, reporters need only travel to the Arizona desert.

A NASA team sent to Chile to aid trapped miners will hold a news conference about their work at the San Jose gold and copper mine near Copiapo at noon CDT, Tuesday, Sept. 7.

NASA and its international partners have assigned three new International Space Station crew members.

Paris (AFP) Sept 6, 2010
The EU executive commission is not providing sufficient support to the European space industry, currently locked in close competition with its US counterpart, the head of French space group Astrium said in an interview published on Monday. "Every country is backing its industry, except Europe," argued Astrium chairman Francois Augue in the French financial paper Les Echos. "If Brussels i

Paris, France (SPX) Sep 07, 2010
Euroconsult has forecast that an estimated 1,220 satellites will be built for launch over the next decade. The average of 122 satellites to be launched per year is up significantly from the annual average of 77 satellites launched in the previous decade, a sign that government and commercial operators require more satellite capabilities. In Euroconsult's just-released "Satellites to be Bui

Washington DC (SPX) Sep 06, 2010
NASA's Desert RATS - or Research and Technology Studies - are making their 13th trip to the desert this fall for another round of analog testing. The Desert RATS tests offer a chance for a NASA-led team of engineers, astronauts and scientists from across the country to come together to conduct technology development research in the Arizona desert. The location offers a good stand-in for de

Lisbon, Portugal (SPX) Sep 07, 2010
New research suggests that the supposedly invariant fine-structure constant, which characterizes the strength of the electromagnetic force, varies from place to place throughout the Universe. The finding could mean rethinking the fundaments of our current knowledge of physics. These results will be presented tomorrow during the Joint European and National Astronomy Meeting in Lisbon, Portu

Washington (UPI) Sep 2, 2010
A survey of near-Earth asteroids shows they come in a far wider variety of shapes, sizes and surfaces than previously thought, U.S. researchers say. The findings are based on infrared scanning of about 100 asteroids by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, SPACE.com reported Thursday. The effort is part of a larger Spitzer telescope project to look at 700 near-Earth objects to identify

Credits: ESA

Credits: ESA

The Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys has captured a remarkable image of a spiral in space. No, not a spiral galaxy, (and not another Norway Spiral!) but the formation of an unusual pre-planetary nebula in one of the most perfect geometrical spirals ever seen. The nebula, called IRAS 23166+1655, is forming around the [...]

There’s something strange going on around the red giant star CW Leonis (a.k.a. IRC+10216). Deep within the star’s carbon-rich veil, astronomers have detected water vapor where no water should be. CW Leonis is similar in mass to the sun, but much older and much larger. It is the nearest red giant to the sun, and [...]

Scientists at the European Southern Observatory have identified the closest looking solar system to our own. They located a sun-like star more than 100 light years distant with as many as seven different planets, including one that might be the smallest ever found outside the solar system. (...)Read the rest of Step On The Scales: [...]

We truly live in an amazing time for exoplanet research. It was only 18 years ago the first planet outside our solar system was discovered. Fifteen since the first confirmation of one around a main sequence star. Even more recently, direct images have begun to sprout up, as well as the first spectra of the [...]

Arthur C Clarke allegedly said that the space elevator would be built fifty years after people stopped laughing. The first space tower though… well, that might need a hundred years. The idea of raising a structure from the ground up to 100 kilometers in height seems more than a bit implausible by today's engineering standards, [...]