With 30 seconds to go before two satellites they built were due to rocket into space, the 20 students or so gathered early this morning in a University of Michigan lab grew quiet. There wasn’t a large celebration when the rocket blasted off. Instead, there was a sense of fulfillment in the lab and an [...]

NASA’s chief Charlie Bolden will be at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Tuesday to announce where the space shuttles will spend their retirements. The 30-year-old shuttle program is ending this summer after two final flights to deliver a Hubble-class science instrument, known as the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, and a year’s worth of supplies [...]

The six astronauts who will fly the space shuttle Discovery on its final mission to the International Space Station arrived at NASA’s Florida spaceport today (Feb. 20), four days ahead of their historic launch. The crewmembers all touched down here at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center by about 3:45 p.m. EST (2045 GMT). Shuttle commander Steve [...]

On Valentine’s Day, as the world was celebrating the message of love, a NASA spacecraft reached the point of closest contact with a comet calculated to be half the size of Manhattan. The periodic comet, Tempel 1, was discovered by German astronomer Ernst Wilhelm Leberecht Tempel in 1867. In every 5.5 years, the comet completes [...]

First the Wife of Endeavour Commander Mark Kelly Is Shot, Then a Crew Member Has Bike Accident The events of the last two Saturdays have stunned NASA in a way the space agency could never anticipated. Mark Kelly, Endeavour’s commander for the space shuttle mission in April, found himself on the way to Arizona where [...]

Kepler-10b is ‘planetary missing link’ NASA has announced it’s nailed the first “bone-fide” [sic] rocky exoplanet, which at 1.4 times the diameter of Earth is the smallest such body spotted to date outside our solar system. As its name suggests, Kepler-10b was identified orbiting star Kepler-10 – at a distance of 560 light years from [...]