A pair of bright spots on Ceres continues to baffle NASA scientists as the space agency’s Dawn spacecraft approaches being captured into orbit of the dwarf planet. Images taken 29,000 miles from the surface reveal the two bright spots. “Ceres’ bright spot can now be seen to have a companion of lesser brightness, but apparently…
2014 was the Earth’s warmest year since records began in 1880, according to reports from federal scientists published Friday. The finding reached by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA offers more confirmation of the planet’s warming trend as a result of greenhouse gas emissions. NOAA stated that 2014’s combined global land and ocean…
A monstrous cloud of accumulated methane—a potent greenhouse gas—is now hovering over a large portion of the western United States according to satellite imagery analyzed by NASA and reported by the Washington Post. Created by years of intentionally released and errantly leaked natural gas during fossil fuel drilling operations, the cloud — invisible to the…
NASA has released a video of a computer model showing carbon dioxide traveling in the atmosphere across the globe. “Plumes of carbon dioxide in the simulation swirl and shift as winds disperse the greenhouse gas away from its sources,” NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center writes. “The simulation also illustrates differences in carbon dioxide levels in…
The unmanned Antares rocket exploded just seconds after takeoff on Tuesday evening at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. The Antares was on a resupply mission to the International Space Station. The private rocket was developed by Orbital Sciences Corporation. It is capable of launching payloads heavier than five tons into low-Earth orbit. The rocket…
Mars has not always been the cold, lifeless planet that it is today. Billions of years ago, the Red Planet looked much more like Earth with an atmosphere and water, possibly even life. Scientists believe that Mars’ atmosphere could have been lost through a combination of factors: a weakened magnetic field and a bombardment from…
NASA is bringing space travel back to the United States. The agency announced this week that Boeing and SpaceX will transport American astronauts to the International Space Station using their CST-100 and Crew Dragon spacecrafts. The private contracts are worth $4.2 billion and $2.6 billion, respectively. The contracts are needed after Russia decided to halt…
NASA has approved the development of its next-generation rocket which will one day carry astronauts to Mars. Government scientists confirmed last week that they have completed a lengthy review of the Space Launch System (SLS), a heavy-lift rocket capable of sending humans well beyond Earth’s orbit. “We are on a journey of scientific and human…
The drought-stricken Colorado River Basin has experienced rapid and significant groundwater depletion since late 2004, posing a greater threat to the water supply of the western United States than previously thought, according to a new study by NASA and University of California, Irvine. The research team used data from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment…
