Just like any hard-working professional, an astronaut can use a good cup of coffee first thing, which is why Lavazza has developed a new custom espresso machine for use in space, destined to find a home aboard the International Space Station.
By nature, astronomical observatories have to be remote—far away from humans and cities and light pollution. That makes these extraordinary facilities difficult to visit, unless you've got Google Street View. Three of Chile's most remote observatories are now open to the digital tourist, and we've found you some of…
This 16-foot-long metal cylinder of unknown origin recently washed up in a Siberian village following severe flooding. Nobody knows where it came from but Aleksey Yaskin, a professor of aerospace engineering at Biysk Technology University, told Reuters that it may be the first stage of a rocket.
Dr. Harold "Sonny" White is still working on a warp drive at NASA's Johnson Space Center. His work is still in the experimental stage but that doesn't mean he can't imagine what the real life Enterprise ship would look like according to his math.
This is The Whirlpool—the common name of M51, a spiral galaxy estimated to be 50,000 to 100,000 light years across. The purple dots that make it look like the biggest neon sign in the Universe are X-ray sources as seen by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory.
This sci-fi themed music video combines heavy metal, embroidery and stop-motion animation to produce something quite unusual. In fact it is the first frame-by-frame embroidered music video and it took 45 million stitches to tell the story of the band's journey to mars to terraform the planet.
NASA's real life interstellar Enterprise concept ship may look straight out of Star Trek, but their Orion crew module for Exploration Flight Test-1 looks chrometastically cool, like the alien spaceship in Flight of the Navigator.
I never imagined I was going to see something like this: A video of a star bursting in space, illuminating the interstellar dust around it at the speed of light. This is not a computer simulation. It's an actual time-lapse video taken over four years by the Hubble—and scientists don't know its origin yet.
From tiny balls of rock to giant egg-shaped objects, there's a rich and varied array of alien worlds that sit outside the orbit of Neptune. You're looking at the ones that the European Space Agency's satellite Herschel has spotted.
Astronaut Reid Wiseman tweeted this Vine shot from an observation window on the International Space Station this week. It shows one full orbit of the ISS around planet earth. It's the first Vine recorded from outer space, and it's literally out of this world.
A group of international astronomers and astrobiologists have published new research that assesses the possibility of complex life on other worlds. Their calculation in the Milky Way alone is staggering: 100 million worlds in our home galaxy may harbor complex alien life. One. Hundred. Million.
There are two things that come at a premium when living aboard the International Space Station: personal space and fresh vegetables. But thanks to an ingenious new inflatable habitat that's currently being tested, our space-faring scientists will soon have more of both.
You're looking back in time. A long, long, long way back in time. This is an image of a star exploding just after the Big Bang happened.
When I saw this image appearing in my RSS I couldn't tell what it was. It looked like a close up of the skin of some animal. Perhaps a detail of a bird or a reptile, I thought. Maybe a colorized microscopic view into some human body part. The answer couldn't possibly be more different than what I expected.
If you told me this was a frame from Alien 5*—with some dude about to get into the dark corridor in which the xenomorph hides, waiting to kill him—I would totally believe you. In reality, it's another cool image by astronaut Reid Wiseman, who is now working in the International Space Station.
A large-scale review of NASA's human spaceflight program has revealed that it doesn't have the budget to successfully undertake manned missions to Mars.
No, this isn't the Eye of Sauron: it's an amazing image of the ringed star HR 4796A, captured by the new Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet Research (SPHERE) instrument at the Very Large Telescope atop Cerro Paranal in Chile. The newly installed SPHERE filters out light to acquire exceptionally sharp images…
NASA has unveiled "the most colorful view of the Universe" ever captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. Part of a study called the Ultraviolet Coverage of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, it's "a composite of separate exposures taken in 2003 to 2012 with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys and Wide Field Camera 3."
Not every scientific exploration of the cosmos requires a multi-year, multi-billion dollar effort a la the Hubble Space Telescope Program. In fact, sometimes all it requires is a reusable sounding rocket, an ultraviolet camera, and six minutes in space.
The "massive malfunction" that killed seven astronauts aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986 also forever changed NASA, an agency that seemed infallible. What breakdown in the decision-making process led to the shuttle lifting off? The organizational structure of NASA itself played a bigger role than you might…
