Sorry Spirit, you're not coming home (see the full xkcd comic strip). As far as space missions go, you couldn’t find a better epic tale than that of Mars Expedition Rover Spirit. Designed to last 3 months, roved for six years; lost the use of a wheel, turned it into a nifty trench-digging tool;...

Something rather bizarre was observed in the asteroid belt on January 6. Ray Villard at Discovery News has just posted an exciting article about the discovery of a comet… but it’s not your average, run-of-the-mill kinda comet. This comet appears to orbit the Sun, embedded in the asteroid...

Which planet does Tethys orbit again? I do admit, I’m terrible with names, but I never forget a face. In this case, the face I didn’t forget was a little moon orbiting Saturn (it’s the one that looks like the Death Star from Star Wars). However, after seeing this photo, I doubt I’ll...

Source: Graph Jam I mean, is the spaghettification of John Cusack using awesome 2012 doomsday graphics too much to ask? Instead of an improbable alien spacecraft appearing over the White House, why not use a black hole, producing so much tidal shear that it rips the building apart brick-by brick? Oh,...

"SuperNova" by Shadow-Trance (DeviantArt) I’m not kidding, last week was a huge mess of a supernova doomsday circus. It was like whispering “there’s a bomb under your chair” to the person next to you in a crowded theater and then watching the resulting flood of people...

…otherwise some Twilight fan site might win. And that would be bad. I don’t really get the whole smoldering vampire craze that’s going on at the moment, but the movies New Moon and Twilight certainly have fans going nutty about fangs and moody teenagers. I actually saw Twilight the...

Released in December 2009, Kate McAlpine (a.k.a. AlpineKat) put together the rather fun “Black Hole Rap” in an effort to trivialize the disinformation being peddled about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). You might remember AlpineKat from the hugely popular (and deliciously geeky) “LHC...

A Terra Satellite view of the UK snow (NASA) I just saw this stunning image on Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy and I assumed it was a fancy bit of art… or a computer generated view of glacial Britain… or UK-shaped frosted cake. Nope, it’s the UK as it looks from space, right now. The...

Forget building gravitational wave detectors costing hundreds of millions of dollars (I’m looking at you, LIGO), make use of the most accurate cosmic timekeepers instead and save a bundle. The North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) is a proposal that involves...

The strange objects orbiting the two stars could be mangled white dwarfs... but the jury is still out (NASA) The first results from NASA’s Kepler exoplanet hunter are in and a perplexing early result has been announced. Yes, the space telescope is working fine, and no, it hasn’t spotted an...