In just a few days, NASA will land one of the more amazing pieces of equipment ever sent into outer space on the Angry Red Planet. On August 5th, at about 10:31 Pacific Time, Curiosity will land on the surface of mars in one of the more spectacularly complex space engineering feats ever attempted. You…

Curiosity Rover is now tweeting its stuff. Things are going to get pretty exciting over the next few days as the space ship comes in for a landing on the Planet Mars. Meanwhile, the Mars Orbiter has made positional adjustments that will facilitate sending information back about the 15 minutes of terror. NASA’s Mars Odyssey…

Dr. Sally Ride is reported to have died today after a long battle with cancer. She was 61. Ride was the first American woman to go into outer space, and the youngest at the time, at age 32. She was also a pioneer in STEM promotion, and a prolific author.

You know what I’m talking about. Here’s the video: The Eagle has landed. Holy crap. Excellent driving. Neil. I love that Armstrong checks to see if it will be possible to get back up the ladder in his space suit before stepping off. Good move. That would have been…interesting…if they could only step onto the…

An exoplanet smaller than the Earth may have been identified in some far away solar system. Astronomers using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope have detected what they believe is a planet two-thirds the size of Earth. The exoplanet candidate, called UCF-1.01, is located a mere 33 light-years away, making it possibly the nearest world to our…

Before getting into this, I just want to give you the best quote about physics from a physicist I’ve seen in a long time. In describing the phenomenon we are discussing here, JPL scientist Slava Turyshev says, “The effect is something like when you’re driving a car and the photons from your headlights are pushing…

The NASA Curiosity Rover will land on August 5th. NASA has provided a way to follow along with the show, using a special web based plugin which is set up for Mac and Windows, but not Linux. As NASA’s Mars Rover Curiosity prepares to land on Mars, public audiences worldwide can take their own readiness…

We’re getting closer to the Impossible Landing that NASA is going to attempt on Mars, and the space agency has sent out a new press release.

The whole Higgs Boson thing is really interesting. Not only was is not discovered over the last several months, but in a way that makes it certain that it exists, but for other reasons as well. Higgs himself predicted its existence a very long time ago and was told by the greats that it really…

From CERN: CERN experiments observe particle consistent with long-sought Higgs boson Geneva, 4 July 2012. At a seminar held at CERN1 today as a curtain raiser to the year’s major particle physics conference, ICHEP2012 in Melbourne, the ATLAS and CMS experiments presented their latest preliminary results in the search for the long sought Higgs particle.…

I thought many of you would want to know about this book. It is from the National Academies Press. Costs 40 bucks if you want the dead tree version, but the PDF is free. Gotta love the National Academies. Here’s the description provided by the NAP: In the five decades since NASA was created, the…

Apparently not, but something interesting is happening. The buzz on the blogosphere is that there will be an announcement on July 4th that the Higgs Boson has been proven to exist, but not “found.” And by “proven” it is meant that empirical evidence of its existence has been gathered, as opposed to a mathematical argument…

Just so you know, scientists do not seem to be able to detect the difference between a 3 foot and a 30 foot deformation of the surface of a planetoid body that is about one and a half billion kilometers away, and we know this because NASA’s Cassini space ship had to actually go all…

Astronomers have discovered something that should not be there. It is an arc of light. The arc is the effect of gravitational lensing which happened as light passed by a massive galaxy about 10 billion years ago in space-time. In other words, in this universe, but very far away and a very long time ago,…

Today is the anniversary of the discovery, by John Tebbutt of New South Wales, Australia, of the Great Comet of 1861. Tebbutt was an astronome. The comet was initially visible only in the southern hemisphere, but then became visible in the northern hemisphere on about June 29th. I find it interesting that word of the…

The Sombrero Galaxy’s Split Personality: The infrared vision of NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has revealed that the Sombrero galaxy — named after its appearance in visible light to a wide-brimmed hat — is in fact two galaxies in one. It is a large elliptical galaxy (blue-green) with a thin disk galaxy (partly seen in red)…

Who says that if you scream in space no one will hear you? A rare daytime meteor was seen and heard streaking over northern Nevada and parts of California on Sunday, just after the peak of an annual meteor shower. Observers in the Reno-Sparks area of Nevada reported seeing a fireball at about 8 a.m.…