Space – Lifeboat News: The Blog

Jul 22
2015

NASA’s making a big exoplanet announcement this week, watch it live!

NASA has had a pretty big month already, but apparently the US space agency’s not done yet. The Ames Research Centre team has revealed that they’ll be making a big announcement on Thursday at 4pm UTC (9am PDT on Thursday, or 2am AEST on Friday) about the exoplanet-hunting Kepler mission. And speculation is already running wild that they may be about to announce the discovery of a new Earth-like planet in the habitable zone of a star… in other words, a potential new home for humanity (or prime spot to look for extraterrestrial life).

Jul 21
2015

Metal foams found to excel in shielding X-rays, gamma rays, neutron radiation

Lightweight composite metal foams like this one have been found effective at blocking X-rays, gamma rays and neutron radiation, and are capable of absorbing the energy of high impact collisions — holding promise for use in nuclear safety, space exploration, and medical technology applications (credit: Afsaneh Rabiei, North Carolina State University)

Jul 21
2015

Colonizing The Moon May Be 90 Percent Cheaper Than We Thought

And that in turn could help us get to Mars, says NASA-commissioned study.

Jul 20
2015

A View of Moon From The Other Side

We know how moon looks form Earth but what does it look like form the other side? Here is a view of our Moon from The Other Side.

Jul 18
2015

NASA just found something big hiding out behind Pluto

NASA and the team behind its New Horizons spacecraft announced today that Pluto — the dwarf planet — has a giant tail.

Jul 18
2015

Soar Over Pluto’s Heart at 77,000 Kilometers in This New Animation

Stunning!

Jul 17
2015

The ESA’s Head Just Dropped a Proposal to Build a Village on the Moon

Sounds good to me!

Jul 17
2015

High-res image of Pluto’s moon Charon shows strange depressed mountain

We’re getting even crisper images of Pluto’s largest moon Charon. NASA just released the first high-resolution photograph of a section of Charon’s surface, zeroing in on a feature that looks like a…

Jul 16
2015

NASA seeking to unlock secrets of longevity

SpaceX Falcon 9 v1.1 rocket with NASA CRS 7 Dragon launches from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station’s Space Launch Complex 40 in Florida photo credit Carleton Bailie SpaceFlight Insider.

Jul 14
2015

How to plan the ultimate long-term project, from the team who got us to Pluto — By Daniel Terdiman | Fast Company

One thing you don’t expect when planning a nine-year mission to the most distant planet in our solar system is the eventuality that Pluto might not be a planet once you got there.

Yet that’s exactly what went down in 2006. That January, NASA launched its unmanned New Horizons probe, a baby grand piano-sized, 1,054-pound spacecraft, on the first-ever route to Pluto. Then, in August 2006, the International Astronomical Union demoted Pluto to the diminutive status of “dwarf planet.”