A second commercial venture to mine the near infinite resources of outer space has been started, and Deep Space Industries (DSI) is promising its spacecraft and 3D printers will allow successful mining operations within a decade. The venture says that it will have its first class of 55lb “FireFly” probes ready for action by 2015,…
A study last year found unusually high levels of the isotope carbon-14 in ancient rings of Japanese cedar trees and a corresponding spike in beryllium-10 in Antarctic ice. The readings were traced back to a point in AD 774 or 775, suggesting that during that period the Earth was hit by an intense burst of…
Scientists believe they may have found the ‘strongest evidence yet’ that Mars may have supported life, but it’s unlikely in the form most people would recognize. New research published in the journal Nature Geoscience suggests a team of scientists could have discovered the ingredients of life in a huge crater up to 5km below the…
Researchers from the Laboratoire Leprince-Ringuet have carried out the first measurement of the intensity of the diffuse extragalactic background light in the nearby Universe, a fog of photons that has filled the Universe ever since its formation. Using some of the brightest gamma-ray sources in the southern hemisphere, the study was carried out using measurements…
New astonishing pictures by the European Space Agency have revealed a 1,500km long and 7km wide river that once ran across Mars. The agency’s Mars Express imaged the striking upper part of the remnants of Reull Vallis river on Mars with its high-resolution stereo camera, ESA said. Reull Vallis, is believed to have formed when…
It’s a wilderness out there in outer space. And as robotic surrogates set the stage for human footprints on Mars and other planetary bodies, just how much respect for other worlds should we have? One suggested response would establish planetary parks for the solar system, an answer that ties together space science and exploration, ethics,…
It may not be self-aware (yet) but this computing monster is ready to take over the world. Well, at least a telescope in Chile. Say hello to the correlator for the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submilimeter Array, or ALMA. The correlator is the computer that runs at the backend of an array of radio telescopes called an…
The first drill sample ever collected on Mars will come from a rockbed shot through with unexpected veins of what appears to be the mineral gypsum. Delighted members of the Curiosity science team announced that the rover was now in a virtual “candy store” of scientific targets—the lowest point of Gale crater, called Yellowknife Bay,…
A newly discovered galactic structure is so large that it means one of our basic assumptions about the nature of the universe could be wrong.
Near the crowded center of a mysteriously dense galactic cloud, where billowing clouds of gas and dust cloak a supermassive black hole three million times as massive as the sun — a black hole whose gravity is strong enough to grip stars that are whipping around it at thousands of kilometers per second — one…