pale blue dot
Earth’s atmosphere is leaking: around 90 tonnes of material escapes and streams out into space from our planet’s upper atmosphere every single day. To understand this escape, NASA launches rockets into space. The space agency also sends scientists to a tiny Arctic town named Ny-Ålesund (English: New Alesund) on the island of Spitsbergen in Svalbard, …
Continue reading “Earth’s atmosphere is leaking and NASA is sending rockets to understand how”
An amazing video by NASA titled “Curiosity at Martian Scenic Overlook”. Curiosity Project Scientist Ashwin Vasavada gives a descriptive tour of the Mars rover’s view in Gale Crater which is 154 kilometers (96 miles) in diameter and estimated to be about 3.5-3.8 billion years old. It is created by an impactor. The crater is also …
A short but amazing video showing both an aurora and sunrise from the International Space Station (ISS), published by the NASA Johnson channel.
Mars, often referred to as the Red Planet, boasts an atmosphere dominated by carbon dioxide, a gas typically associated with warmth-inducing greenhouse effects on Earth. Yet, anyone expecting balmy temperatures on Mars would be in for a chilly surprise. Despite its CO₂-rich atmosphere, Mars remains an icy desert with temperatures often plummeting far below freezing. …
Continue reading “Here’s why Mars is cold despite having an atmosphere of mostly carbon dioxide”
NASA has published a beautiful photo of Apollo 12 at the launch pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center Launch Complex 39. This historic image, taken on October 28, 1969 (50 years ago) frames the Apollo 12 spacecraft atop the mighty Saturn V rocket and its destination, the Moon, in a single photo.
On October 24, 2019, NASA has published a new selfie of the Curiosity Mars Rover, which was taken on October 11, the 2,553rd Martian day, or sol, of the rover’s mission. The space agency has also announced that Curiosity’s successor, the Mars 2020 Rover now stands on its own six wheels.
On October 18, 2019, NASA held an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on Reddit. Scientists from the space agency answered questions about Van Allen Probes, two robotic spacecraft that were used to study the Van Allen radiation belts that surround planet Earth.
You can download and print NASA’s “Solar System and Beyond” Poster Set for free. The posters are best printed on 11”x17” paper.
A good rule of thumb: if you see a headline saying something “breaks the laws of physics” (i.e. the “Impossible Engine”) the headline is flat-out wrong.
Russian space agency Roscosmos started to publish declassified documents from the Space Race, a 20th-century arm-wrestling to achieve firsts in spaceflight capability between two Cold War rivals, the Soviet Union (USSR) and the United States (US).
