Hubble to Look Close for Alien Planets

  Though aging, the 23-year-old Hubble Space Telescope has a new assignment in the search for planets circling other stars. In October 2014 and February 2016, Hubble will take aim at Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the sun. Previous attempts to find planets...

U. S. Astronaut Hall of Fame Welcomes Three

Three NASA shuttle-era astronauts, two of them women, were inducted into the U. S. Astronaut Hall of Fame on Saturday. Those honored in ceremonies at the Hall, close to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Fla., included Eileen Collins, the first woman...

2014 NASA Budget Starts Ambitious Asteroid Mission

President Obama seeks steady NASA budgets of $17.7 billion through 2018 in the funding request he presented to Congress on Wednesday, enough to start the space agency on an ambitious mission to identify and maneuver an asteroid into lunar orbit, where U. S. astronauts...

Planck Mission Finds Universe a Bit Older, Still Mysterious

The European Space Agency’s Planck mission is revealing new details about the early universe, prompting scientists to revise estimates for the age, makeup, material consistency and expansion of the cosmos following the Big Bang. The European space telescope was...

Free Downloads! Looking Up at Hubble, James Webb Space Telescopes

Here are two celestial stocking stuffers for the mind and for those still shopping – just in time for the holidays and new year! NASA has issued two new e-books, one on the Hubble Space Telescope, the other on the still-to-be-launched, next-generation space...