"A big rusty transporter came over the hill and the Jawas sold it for scrap metal..." -- Paul Quinn NASA is giving Mars rover Spirit one more month to signal that she’s still alive before search operations are scaled back and attention shifted to her sister rover Opportunity. Unfortunately,...

Comet Tempel 1 near Stardust-NExT close approach (NASA) A NASA spacecraft, a lonely comet and a Valentine’s date with no comparison. Last night, NASA’s veteran Stardust-NExT mission successfully visited its second comet, Tempel 1. Having already been visited by NASA’s Deep Impact mission...

Solar spicules as imaged by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (NASA) There’s one recurring question I’ve been asking for nearly a decade: Why is the Sun’s corona (its atmosphere) so hot? When asking this out loud I inevitably get the sarcastic “um, because the Sun is…...

The Voyager 2 spacecraft has been speeding through the Solar System since 1977 and it’s seen a lot. Besides scooting past Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, the probe is now passing through the very limit of the heliosphere (called the heliopause) where it has begun to detect a magnetic field...

Where is this mystical land? (NASA/ESA/HST). Sometimes, words are not enough to describe views of the universe when captured through the lens of the Hubble Space Telescope. This is one of those moments. Kicking off its 20th anniversary (yes, that super-sized telescope has been in space that long —...

Things have been moving fast for NASA in recent weeks, culminating in President Obama’s inspiring speech at Kennedy Space Center on Thursday. I haven’t commented on the new direction for the US space agency’s direction thus far as I’ve needed some time to digest the ramifications...

Sure, NASA is a government agency, but can you think of any other agency with the power to inspire a nation? That’s the gist of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s presentation at the University of New York at Buffalo on March 31st, certainly worth watching.

The Project M android... haven't I seen you somewhere before? As you know, I’m highly dubious about this “Project M” that has just surfaced on the intertoobs (I strongly suspect it’s a hoax). But doubts aside, I kept looking at that android throwing stones on the lunar surface...

Doing for NASA what Star Wars did for sci-fi, send C3PO to the Moon! Huh? OK, so I have little idea about this project because there’s not much information circulating, but I hope it’s not real. It looks like NASA’s Johnson Space Center is heading up a robotic mission to the Moon....

A space station in the movie '2001: A Space Odyssey.' It's hard to believe that by 2015 we might not have any manned outpost in orbit (sci-fi writers never saw that coming). I was only half joking when I tweeted, “Vote for your favorite NASA accomplishment in 2009: http://bit.ly/83xWlJ...