Astronomy, Space | featured news

A Dutch entrepreneur's financial plan for a colony on Mars is based on selling the television rights to cover the project every step of the way.

Space exploration has long been about reaching far off destinations but now there's a race to exploit new frontiers by mining their minerals. When Neil Armstrong first stepped on the Moon in 1969, it was part of a "flags and footprints" strategy to beat the Soviets, a triumph of imagination and innovation, not an attempt to extract precious metals.

A commercial vessel carrying a ton of supplies for the International Space Station ran into thruster trouble shortly after liftoff Friday, and flight controllers scrambled to fix the problem. SpaceX founder Elon Musk said three of the four sets of thrusters on the company's unmanned Dragon capsule did not immediately kick in, delaying the release of the solar panels.

In case you just can’t get enough impact news, it looks like Mars may actually get hit by a comet in 2014! As it stands right now, the chance of a direct impact are small, but it’s likely Mars will get pelted by the debris associated with the comet.

Millionaire spaceflier Dennis Tito has worked out a plan to send two astronauts to Mars and back without stopping — but the 501-day flight plan won’t work unless it launches in 2018.

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.

Private group works to prevent next close encounter with an asteroid or meteors. The Earth may have survived its close encounters with an asteroid and a meteor Friday, but the episodes focused new attention on gaps in astronomers' ability to identify smaller space rocks like these capable of inflicting widespread destruction.

Science editor Alan Boyle's blog: The best way for most of us to watch asteroid 2012 DA14 come within 17,200 miles of Earth, and then recede harmlessly into the cosmos, is to watch the show online.

The Mars rover Curiosity drilled into the Martian surface for the first time as part of an effort to learn if the planet most like Earth in the solar system ever had conditions to support microbial life, NASA said on Saturday.

A 150-foot-wide asteroid will come remarkably close to Earth next week, even closer than high-flying communication and weather satellites. It will be the nearest known flyby for an object of this size....