NASA will tomorrow launch a spectacular mission to bomb the Moon. Their LCROSS mission will blast off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, carrying a missile that will blast a hole in the lunar surface at twice the speed of a bullet. The missile, a Centaur rocket, will be steered by a shepherding spacecraft that will guide it towards its target – a crater close to the Moon’s south pole. Scientists expect the blast to be so powerful that a huge plume of debris will be ejected. Read the full story

2009-10-03

“It could happen almost any time now. We now have the technological capability to identify Earth-like planets around the smallest stars.”

David Latham -Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

To date, Planet hunters have spotted more than 300 planets beyond our solar system, but the vast majority are hot, Jupiter-sized planets that would dwarf the Earth and are almost certainly lifeless. Read the full story

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Moon Water: A Game-Changing Discovery

The discovery of widespread but small amounts water on the surface of the moon, announced yesterday, stands as one of the most surprising findings in planetary science.

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WASHINGTON — NASA will hold a media briefing at 2 p.m. EDT on Thursday, Sept. 24, to discuss new science data from the moon collected during national and international space missions. NASA Television and the agency’s Web site will provide live coverage of the briefing from the James E. Webb Memorial Auditorium at NASA Headquarters, 300 E St. SW, in Washington.

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NASA launches rocket, dozens report strange lights

WALLOPS ISLAND, Va. – NASA says it successfully launched a rocket in Virginia as part of an experiment, and the blast may have caused dozens of people to report seeing strange lights in the sky. Read the full story

Asteroid Juno set to brighten your night September 21st 2009

Toward the end of September, the sun will turn a spotlight on the asteroid Juno, giving that bulky lump of rock a rare featured cameo in the night sky. Those who get out to a dark, unpolluted sky will be able to spot the asteroid’s silvery glint near the planet Uranus with a pair of binoculars. Read the full story

Sept. 14, 2009 — Attention, countries of the world: Do you know where your moon rocks are?

The discovery of a fake moon rock in the Netherlands’ national museum should be a wake-up call for more than 130 countries that received gifts of lunar rubble from both the Apollo 11 flight in 1969 and Apollo 17 three years later. Read the full story

By Charles Q. Choi, Special to LiveScience

posted: 09 September 2009 10:01 am ET

Scientists have now levitated mice using magnetic fields.

Other researchers have made live frogs and grasshoppers float in mid-air before, but such research with mice, being closer biologically to humans, could help in studies to counteract bone loss due to reduced gravity over long spans of time, as might be expected in deep space missions or on the surfaces of other planets. Read the full story

(CNN) — What would you see if you could fly over Mars in a plane and look out the window?

It must be something like the thousands of curious, intriguing and spectacular images taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera mounted on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

The University of Arizona, Tucson, which operates HiRISE, has just released a new batch of these photos taken in the last several months. Read the full story

PASADENA, Calif. — NASA scientists have discovered glycine, a fundamental building block of life, in samples of comet Wild 2 returned by NASA’s Stardust spacecraft.

“Glycine is an amino acid used by living organisms to make proteins, and this is the first time an amino acid has been found in a comet,” said Jamie Elsila of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “Our discovery supports the theory that some of life’s ingredients formed in space and were delivered to Earth long ago by meteorite and comet impacts.” Read the full story

Source:

http://www.nasa.gov/

NASA reported on Thursday that its new exoplanet-hunting Kepler space telescope passed its first big test. The spacecraft, which is carrying a telescope and a series of computers, showed off its scientific capabilities by successfully detecting the atmosphere of a known giant gas planet.

The discovery proves the telescope’s ability to take highly precise measurements, which will be critical to finding other Earthlike planets. Read the full story