Space
Space includes outer space, the sun and planets in the solar systemThe Legacy of Apollo
On July 16, 1969, NASA launched Apollo 11, the mission that put two men on the moon four days after lift-off.Forty years later, historians and NASA officials are still trying to gauge the legacy of the Apollo program. On Thursday, five panelists met at NASA headquarters to discuss its impact.Many o...
July 18, 2009 |
By Ashley Luthern
Picture of the Week—Apollo 11 Solar Wind Composition Experiment
NASA didn’t send people to the moon just to bounce around and hit golf balls; Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin of Apollo 11 were performing science experiments during their brief time on the lunar surface. What looks like a white towel next to Aldrin in the photo above was the Solar Wind Composition ...
July 17, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
The Apollo 11 Owners’ Workshop Manual
If you wanted to replace the muffler on your Ford Mustang, you might logically turn to your handy copy of the Haynes Repair Manual. If you wanted to install a new space sextant in the Apollo 11 Command Module, you wouldn’t turn to the new Haynes Owners’ Workshop Manual, but you would have such a go...
July 16, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Science News From the Smithsonian
The tourists visiting the Smithsonian museums may not realize it, but there is a ton of fascinating research going on, sometimes within just a few feet of where they are standing. And in addition to the museums and the zoo, there are researchers at the astrophysical observatory in Massachusetts, th...
July 15, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
A New Kind of Black Hole
Until now, there have been two known types of black holes: stellar-mass black holes that are several times more massive than our sun and are created when really big stars die out, and supermassive black holes that are millions to billions of times the mass of the sun and which sit in the center of ...
July 02, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Moonwalk Launch Party
The launch 40 years ago of Apollo 11, which put a man on the moon, brought Americans together during a time of nationwide unrest
July 2009 |
By David Burnett
Find the International Space Station with Twitter
Though I may be tweeting (@SarahZielinski), I’m still not exactly convinced of the value of Twitter. That said, a new service called Twisst (follow @twisst) is starting to convince me otherwise. Twisst uses Twitter in an interesting mashup with other services to let followers know when they can vie...
June 30, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
An Explanation for the Missing Sunspots
I bet that most of you don’t know that the sunspots are missing. That’s okay. I’m sure many people don’t realize that the sun is more than just a ball of fire: it has a complex internal structure, features that vary based on multi-year cycles, and it can create solar storms that knock out power and...
June 18, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Picture of the Week--Next-Gen Mars Rover
Those two little Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, have far outlasted their original expected lifespans, but they have their limitations. They may have traveled far, but they have sometimes gotten stuck along the way. And we never saw them attempt to traverse a cliff or crevasse. The tethered "C...
June 12, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
How Should Earth Respond to an Alien Message?
How would you respond if we received a message from intelligent life in outer space? The SETI Institute would like to know. Their "Earth Speaks" project is soliciting messages (text, sounds and images), but rather than picking a favorite or favorites, the messages are tagged to summarize the conten...
May 21, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Hubble's Ugliest Photographs
With the Hubble Space Telescope’s fifth—and final—repair mission underway, Smithsonian.com highlighted the finest photographs taken by the world’s most famous telescope. While Hubble has plenty of hits, not all of its more than 200,000 pictures can be compared to Vincent Van Gogh’s “Starry Night.” ...
May 12, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
The Hubble Space Telescope’s Finest Photos
Now that the telescope has received its final upgrades, we look back on Hubble's most memorable images from space
May 06, 2009 |
By Joseph Caputo
After Space, Saving Suits, Boots and Gloves
The spacesuits that kept U.S. astronauts alive now owe their survival to one woman
May 2009 |
By Megan Gambino
Forensic Astronomer Solves Fine Arts Puzzles
Astrophysicist Don Olson breaks down the barriers between science and art by analyzing literature and paintings from the past
April 2009 |
By Jennifer Drapkin and Sarah Zielinski
A Spaceship Visits the National Mall
Visitors to the National Mall will get a treat today. Parked just outside the National Air and Space Museum is a mockup of the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle, the spacecraft that will replace the Space Shuttle, which will go out of service next year.NASA and the U.S. Navy built this replica of the ...
March 30, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Picture of the Week—Saturn
No, the picture of the week is not going to be of baby clouded leopards. The National Zoo's new bundles of joy are unbearably cute, it's true. But for a real ooh-aah experience, check out the Jet Propulsion Lab's gallery of images from the Cassini-Huygens Mission.Cassini has been zipping around Sat...
March 27, 2009 |
By Laura Helmuth
Vote for Hubble’s Next Target
In honor of the International Year of Astronomy—an effort led by UNESCO and the International Astronomical Union “to help the citizens of the world rediscover their place in the Universe through the day- and night-time sky, and thereby engage a personal sense of wonder and discovery”—the managers o...
January 29, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
The Milky Way is Bigger, Faster, and Heading for Trouble
Have you heard that the Milky Way is bigger than we thought? Fifty percent bigger, according to new measurements from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. (Insert candy bar joke here.) Our Around the Mall blog chatted with one of the astronomers responsible for the discovery. The bad ne...
January 09, 2009 |
By Laura Helmuth
Picture of the Week—Christmas Tree Cluster
If it is clear out tonight, grab your binoculars or a telescope and look up at the constellation of Monoceros, the Unicorn. There you will find NGC 2264, a region of space that includes the Christmas Tree Cluster, named for its triangular shape (upside-down here) and sparkly blue stars. Astronomer ...
December 25, 2008 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Picture of the Week—Jupiter and Ganymede
How far we have come from 1609, when Galileo Galilei first aimed his telescope towards the little twinkly dots in the sky and saw stars and planets. Turning his sights on Jupiter in 1610, he noticed that some stars near the planet disappeared over the following nights—he had discovered some of the ...
December 19, 2008 |
By Sarah Zielinski
