To Prepare For Mars Settlement, Simulated Missions Explore Utah’s Desert – NPR

Crew members on one of the simulated Mars missions this spring included Pitchayapa Jingjit (from left), Becky Parker, Elijah Espinoza and Esteban Ramirez. Community college students and teachers in real life, the team members spent a week in the Utah desert, partly to experience the isolation and challenges of a real trip to Mars. Rae […]

SpaceX delivers for Intelsat on heavyweight Falcon 9 mission – Spaceflight Now

SpaceX delivers for Intelsat on heavyweight Falcon 9 mission – Spaceflight Now

Credit: SpaceX A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket rumbled into the sky Wednesday from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, flexing the rocket’s muscles and lofting a massive Intelsat satellite to orbit supporting wireless communications, television broadcasting and trans-Atlantic data relays. Recovering from back-to-back countdown aborts earlier in the week, the two-stage, 229-foot-tall (70-meter) launcher lit […]

Antarctic iceberg: Giant ‘white wanderer’ poised to break free – BBC News

Media captionThe putative iceberg has been modelled using observations from the Cryosat spacecraft Everybody is fascinated by icebergs. The idea that you can have blocks of frozen water the size of cities, and bigger, sparks our sense of wonder. British astronaut Tim Peake photographed one from orbit that would just about fit inside Central London’s […]

In Neanderthal DNA, Signs of a Mysterious Human Migration – New York Times

The mystery only deepened in 2013. Another team of researchers retrieved mitochondrial DNA from a Neanderthal-like fossil at Sima de los Huesos, dating back 430,000 years. The researchers had expected the DNA to resemble that of later Neanderthals in Europe. Instead, the mitochondrial DNA looked like it belonged to Denisovans — even though the Denisova […]

SpaceX Saved Its Fourth of July Rocket For National Hangover Day – Gizmodo

Image: SpaceX If you spent the long weekend drinking enough rum to kill a pirate army, you’re not alone. Fifth of July, colloquially known as National Hangover Day, is a time for reflecting and repenting. Luckily for all our dumb asses, there’s a bright spot: Tonight, SpaceX will attempt to relaunch the rocket it was […]

Scientists are starting to clear up one of the biggest controversies in climate science – Washington Post

This illustration obtained from NASA on Jan. 20, 2016, shows that 2015 was the warmest year since modern record-keeping began in 1880, according to a new analysis by NASAs Goddard Institute for Space Studies. (Scientific Visualization Studio/Goddard Space Flight Center via AFP-Getty Images) How much Earth will warm in response to future greenhouse gas emissions may […]

Ancient Romans made world’s ‘most durable’ concrete. We might use it to stop rising seas. – Washington Post

Drilling at a marine structure in Portus Cosanus, Tuscany, in 2003. (J.P. Oleson) Two thousand years ago, Roman builders constructed vast sea walls and harbor piers. The concrete they used outlasted the empire — and still holds lessons for modern engineers, scientists say. A bunch of half-sunken structures off the Italian coast might sound less […]

NASA’s 1st Mars Rover Landed 20 Years Ago Today – Space.com

Mars exploration took a big leap 20 years ago today. On July 4, 1997, NASA’s Pathfinder mission touched down on the Red Planet, delivering an eponymous lander and a small rover called Sojourner — the agency’s first wheeled Mars craft — to the surface. Pathfinder was the first NASA mission […]

Giant croc had teeth like a T. rex – BBC News

Image copyright Natural History Museum in Milan Image caption The giant croc would have scavenged on sauropod carcasses Researchers have described new fossils belonging to an extinct crocodile-like creature that had a set of serrated teeth like those of a T. rex. The animal was a top predator in Madagascar 170 million years ago, around […]

Scientists explain ancient Rome’s long-lasting concrete – BBC News

Image copyright JP OLESON Image caption Scientists examined samples from this ancient Roman pier with very high-powered X-rays Researchers have unlocked the chemistry of Roman concrete which has resisted the elements for thousands of years. Ancient sea walls built by the Romans used a concrete made from lime and volcanic ash to bind with rocks. […]

1 93 94 95 96 97 168