Suddenly and for the first time I saw Amanda as a little child wide eyed with both awe and fear, among other children some sitting on the floor, some in chairs, some standing behind desks, eyes trained on a TV monitor and their teacher as the sudden realization dawned on all of them that the…

From NASA: On Oct. 17, 2012, during its 174th orbit around the gas giant, Cassini was deliberately positioned within Saturn’s shadow, a perfect location from which to look in the direction of the sun and take a backlit view of the rings and the dark side of the planet. Looking back towards the sun is…

Amy Shira Teitel’s video:

Ebb and Flow were the twin space craft that mapped in the Moon’s gravitational field by flying near each other, and then as the gravity of the Moon tugged on them they could suss out how much gravity that was, exactly. The gravity map of the moon, actually two of them, at two different scales,…

But not that moon. Saturn’s moon. And it is not really the Nile. But, just as the Nile is one of the longest rivers on Earth, this new river is the longest river observed anywhere other than the earth. Yay Earth, you have the Longest Rivers known to Earthlings!

The picture above is what the Moon would look like if you wore gravity glasses. We’ve been following the Grail Mission for some time now, and new results are in. NASA has made a very detailed gravity map of the moon. The Grail mission involves the use of two space craft flying next to each…

I have 3D Sun on my iPad, and every now and then it beeps at me and tells me that something important is happening. Earlier today it beeped at me to tell me that an ENORMOUS solar eruption happened. Notice that the update just prior to the Huge Eruption is an update daying “NOAA forecasters…

So far indeed. It is blobbish and small, but interesting. From NASA: PASADENA, Calif. – By combining the power of NASA’s Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes and one of nature’s own natural “zoom lenses” in space, astronomers have set a new record for finding the most distant galaxy seen in the universe. The farthest galaxy…

The Drake Equation is that famous equation where you count how many stars there are, figure out the chance of a star having planets, of planets having water, etc. etc. until finally you get some rough estimate of the chance of live evolving elsewhere in the universe. It’s a little more complicated (and also simpler)…

Sitting on top of enough explosive stuff to send a heavy weight into orbit at a high speed is dangerous, and that has cost lives in the space program. Re-entering the earth’s atmosphere, effectively imitating a meteor as it burns up owing to the translation of the aforereferenced kinetic energy into heat is also dangerous…

Late Winter, 1997, just before moving from Boston to Minnesota, was very snowy out east. And, that year I had stupidly agreed to shovel the snow for our apartment building in exchange for a pittance of some kind. One night I was shoveling the latest 7 inch storm off the walk, and the father of…

From NASA: …astronomers have, for the first time, spotted planets orbiting sun-like stars in a crowded cluster of stars. The findings offer the best evidence yet that planets can sprout up in dense stellar environments. Although the newfound planets are not habitable, their skies would be starrier than what we see from Earth. The starry-skied…

Remember the GRAIL mission? At the beginning of the year, two satellites, named Ebb and Flow, arrived at the Moon and fell into a parallel orbit. There is an instrument on board that very precisely determines the distance between the two space craft, said to be about the size of a typical washing machine. As…