Astronomy, Nasa | featured news

NASA is aiming to launch a rocket to an asteroid in five years and grab a boulder off of it — a stepping stone for an eventual trip sending humans to Mars.

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

NASA's Curiosity rover results confirm that Mars has lost most of its atmosphere, on its way to becoming a cold, dry planet. In experimental results reported Monday at a European geoscience meeting in Vienna, Austria, a look at the Martian air by the $2.5 billion rover finds evidence that as much as 90% of the original atmosphere there has dissipated into space over the planet's lifetime. "It was still red, but it means that Mars once was a warmer, wetter world," says rover team scientist Sushil Atreya of the University of Michigan. "It was also a more habitable world, essentially four billion years ago."

NASA is planning for a robotic spaceship to lasso a small asteroid and park it near the moon for astronauts to explore, a top senator revealed Friday.

More than 35 years after it launched on a mission to explore the cosmos, NASA's unmanned Voyager spacecraft appears to have left the solar system and is in a "new region" of space, said a study Wednesday.

NASA scientists say tests on a Mars rock show the planet could have supported primitive life. The analysis was done by the rover Curiosity, which drilled into the rock, crushed it and tested a tiny sample. The rover was the first spacecraft sent to Mars that could collect a sample from deep inside a rock.

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.

Upon further review, a big scary-sounding asteroid is no longer even a remote threat to smash into Earth in about 20 years, NASA says....

Nasa scientists are planning to capture a 500 ton asteroid , relocate it and turn it into a space station for astronauts on their way to Mars. The White House's Office of Science and technology will consider the £1.6bn plan in the coming weeks as it prepares to set its space exploration agenda for the next decade.

At 5:28 p.m. Monday, NASA’s Grail spacecraft will crash into the Moon’s shadows. (What would you call the half of the Moon facing away from the Sun?)