Russia, Astronomy | featured news

NASA is blaming Congress for the need to pay $424 million more to Russia to get U.S. astronauts into space.

Could a “Deathstar” someday defend Earth against incoming threats from space? Last Friday, asteroid 2012 DA14 -- half a football field long and weighing about 190,000 tons -- missed plane Earth in a fly-by. Far smaller and therefore harder to detect was the 50 foot long asteroid that injured more than 1,000 Russians when it stuck a few hours earlier.

A meteor streaked across the sky and exploded over Russia's Ural Mountains with the power of an atomic bomb Friday, its sonic blasts shattering countless windows and injuring nearly 1,000 people. The spectacle deeply frightened many Russians, with some elderly women declaring that the world was coming to an end. Many of the injured were cut by flying glass as they flocked to windows to see what the source was for such an intense flash of light.

Russian officials say a meteorite has fallen in the Chelyabinsk region some 1,500 kilometers (930 miles) east of Moscow.

A Russian Soyuz craft launched into the morning skies over Kazakhstan on Sunday, carrying three astronauts on their way to the International Space Station, where they will quickly start preparing for a frenzy of incoming traffic....

After more than two decades of drilling in Antarctica, Russian scientists have reached the surface of a gigantic freshwater lake hidden under miles of ice for some 20 million years — a lake that may hold life from the distant past and clues to the search for life on other planets.

The failed Russian space probe Phobos-Grunt fell back to Earth on Sunday, crashing in the southeastern Pacific Ocean off Chile, Russia's state news agency Itar-Tass announced.

Some of the recent failures of Russian satellites may have been the result of sabotage by foreign forces, the nation's space chief said.

Russian scientists were racing against the clock Wednesday to find a way to fire the engines of an unmanned probe destined to collect soil samples from a moon of Mars, after equipment failure shortly after launch left it stuck in Earth orbit....

Pieces of the unmanned supply ship, bound for the International Space Station, fell in Siberia amid an explosion, officials said.