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13 Dec 2010 - PASADENA, Calif. - The 33-year odyssey of NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft has reached a distant point at the edge of our solar system where there is no outward motion of solar wind.


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Science News: How to use a pulsar to find Starbucks
Cosmic GPS would employ pulsing stars, not satellites, as celestial beacons
By Marissa Cevallos

To find your favorite coffee shop in an unknown city, getting directions via satellite works like a charm. But that technology won’t get you from Earth to Jupiter ( Read more... )

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The Daily Telegraph (UK): Happy Carl Sagan Day, everybody
By Tom Chivers

It would have been Carl Sagan’s 76th birthday on Tuesday, and his army of nerdish fans around the world have dedicated a day to his memory. It’s today, for some reason, so go and celebrate.

There’s a lot to love about Sagan: a great scientist and great author, a genuine ( Read more... )

There are oases of water-rich soil that could sustain astronauts on the Moon, according to Nasa.

Scientists studied the full results of an experiment that smashed a rocket and a probe into a lunar crater last year.

The impacts kicked up large amounts of rock and dust, revealing a suite of fascinating chemical compounds and far more water than anyone ( Read more... )

THE GIST
- The earliest known astronomical object is a galaxy appearing about 600 million years after the universe formed.
- The previously known most distant object was a short-lived gamma ray burst.
- The newly discovered galaxy is interesting to astrophysicists trying to understand how these early objects changed gas in interstellar space.

( The universe's most senior citizen is a galaxy that formed 600 million years after the Big Bang. )

In a burst of science-is-fun educational invention, a Brooklyn dad built a carrier for an iPhone (the current model, with video camera) out of a takeout box, tied it to a weather balloon, and let it go with the camera running. It reached a height of nineteen miles, or about 100,000 feet, which is high enough to show the earth's curvature and a ( Read more... )

From Discovery News ( Read more... )

NASA's Mars Spirit Rover, now a stationary probe stuck in the sands of the Red Planet, may not survive the Martian Winter.
If you'll remember, Spirit suffered devastating wheel breakage late last year, and in January NASA officially christened the eternally immobilized rover as a "stationary probe," doomed to live of the remainder of its days stuck ( Read more... )

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