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Gemini Observatory Images Show Comet ISON Racing Towards a Close Brush with the Sun

Images of Comet ISON over the past three months hint at coming changes as comet speeds into the inner solar system.

1 Jun 2013

Campaign Launched for Crowdfunded Space Telescope

Planetary Resources, Inc., the asteroid mining company, has launched a campaign for the world's first crowdfunded space telescope to provide unprecedented public access to space and place the most advanced exploration technology into the hands of students, scientists and a new generation of citizen explorers.

30 May 2013

ILOA Unveils Flight Test Hardware for Worlds' First Private Lunar Telescope

The International Lunar Observatory Association (ILOA), based in Hawai`i and led by American businessman and educator Steve Durst , today unveiled flight test hardware for the first private telescope that will be launched to the Moon in 2015.

29 May 2013

NASA may be Able to Repair Kepler Space Telescope

NASA officials announced Wednesday, May 15, that the Kepler space telescope – the agency's primary instrument for detecting planets beyond our solar system – had suffered a critical failure and could soon be shut down permanently.

20 May 2013

NASA Implants Part of the Eyes of James Webb Space Telescope

Much like the inside of an operating room, in the clean room at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., engineers worked meticulously to implant part of the eyes of the James Webb Space Telescope. They scrubbed up and suited up to perform one of the most delicate performances of their lives. That part of the eyes, the MIRI, or Mid-Infrared Instrument, will glimpse the formation of galaxies and see deeper into the universe than ever before.

16 May 2013

Teachers Fly Aboard NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy 747 Jet

Constance Gartner first heard about NASA’s SOFIA (Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy) from her students at the Wisconsin School for the Deaf in Delavan, Wis.

7 May 2013

Herschel Space Observatory Exhausts Liquid Helium Supply, will Cease Active Duty

After making over 35 000 observations and logging more than 25 000 hours of studying the Universe, the Herschel Space Observatory has exhausted its supply of liquid helium, which is required to cool the telescope's instruments to make highly precise measurements.

2 May 2013

Ultra-Sensitive VLA Helps Identify Discrete Sources Linked to Most Radio Waves from Distant Galaxies

Staring at a small patch of sky for more than 50 hours with the ultra-sensitive Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA), astronomers have for the first time identified discrete sources that account for nearly all the radio waves coming from distant galaxies. They found that about 63 percent of the background radio emission comes from galaxies with gorging black holes at their cores and the remaining 37 percent comes from galaxies that are rapidly forming stars.

2 May 2013

Characterization by Proxy Used to Infer Properties of Small, Relatively Cool Distant Stars

A University of Washington astronomer is using Earth's interstellar neighbors to learn the nature of certain stars too far away to be directly measured or observed, and the planets they may host.

29 Apr 2013