flickering pictures

According to new data from a U.S. military satellite, the ionosphere — the boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and space — is lower than it used to be, meaning the sky is quite literally falling.
The Air Force’s “Communications and Navigation Outage Forecasting System” satellite — C/NOFS for short — uses nifty-sounding instruments like an ion velocity […]

[Read more →]

A little while ago, I got an e-mail from Meg White, a graduate student at Columbia College Chicago who’s working on an article about India’s space program. She had stumbled across my post on the Chandarayaan lunar missions, and wanted to bounce a few questions off a non-scholarly blogger type.
Because I though […]

[Read more →]

Space elevator: a proposed megastructure designed to transport material from a celestial body’s surface into space as a way of non-rocket spacelaunch.
Picture a super-strong ribbon thinner than a sheet of paper, one metre wide and long enough to wrap two and a half times around the world. Now picture it extending into space, the […]

[Read more →]

As The Economist wrote when China launched its first manned space mission a few years back: “Congratulations! So no more aid then?”
From the Times of India:

The spacecraft, lodged at `Checkout 2′ room at the centre is all decked up with golden multilayer insulated foils covering a major part of its body with the highly […]

[Read more →]

We don’t know what it was, what it was made of, or how much mass it held. It didn’t act like a supernova and wasn’t even in a galaxy, as far as we can tell. All we’re sure of is that it radiated a light spectrum we’ve never seen before, was really far […]

[Read more →]

We’ve known for a long time that there’s an awful lot of water in space. Comets send huge amounts of the stuff hurtling every which way, and just last Thursday NASA extracted water from Martian soil for the very first time. But because the universe is, for the most part, really really cold, […]

[Read more →]

Travelex, the world’s largest currency exchange company, wants to see its newly minted Quasi Universal Intergalactic Denomination (QUID) become the money of choice for spacefaring tourists.
The cutesy name might be a bit of a stretch — intergalactic? — but with space tourism starting to take off, thrill-seeking billionaires from all over the world may well […]

[Read more →]