Ever wonder what space smells like? Well, when astronauts return from space walks and remove their helmets, they notice an odor that's downright bizarre, described as "seared steak...hot metal...[and] welding fumes." Continue reading for more fascinating facts about things in everyday life that might shock you.
Did you know that there's a real-life Tatooine planet, complete with two suns? Kepler-16b is a Saturn-mass planet consisting of half gas and half rock and ice, and it orbits a binary star, Kepler-16, with a period of 229 days. "[It] is the first confirmed, unambiguous example of a circumbinary planet - a planet orbiting not one, but two stars," said Josh Carter of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, one of the discovery team. Continue reading for more.
Since the arrival of Expedition 1 on 2 November 2000, the station has been continuously occupied for 12 years and 357 days, currently the longest continuous human presence in space. The ISS programme is a joint project among five participating space agencies: NASA, Roskosmos, JAXA, ESA, and CSA. Continue reading for more mind-blowing images of Earth captured by the astronauts aboard the ISS.
The most notable claim is that the six manned landings (1969-1972) were faked and that the twelve Apollo astronauts did not walk on the Moon. Conspiracy theorists (henceforth conspiracists) base their claims on the notion that NASA and others knowingly misled the public into believing the landings happened by manufacturing, destroying, or tampering with evidence; including photos, telemetry tapes, transmissions, rock samples, and even some key witnesses. Continue reading for more.
For $75000, you'll soon be able to take trips to the edge of space in this special balloon. Developed by World View, the flight would take 90 minutes to go up at about 1,000 feet a minute, set sail up high for 2 hours with an emphasis on smooth riding, hit an altitude of 19 miles and then come back down in 40 minutes, Poynter said. Continue reading for a video and more information.
Above, we see KOI 172.02, the most Earth-like planet found yet, and it's actually about 1.5 times bigger than our blue planet, so it's classed as a 'super-Earth'. The planet is also following an orbit that is well within the habitable zone of a star that is rather similar to our Sun - means that the planet could feature liquid water and potentially oceans on its surface. Continue reading for more.
To start things off, we know that the International Space Station orbits planet Earth at an altitude of approximately 420 kilometers, and the Moon, 365,000 kilometers. Ever wonder what the latter would look like if they swapped places? This video will show you just that, from the perspective of a person on the ground in Huntsville, Alabama. Continue reading for more.
Stunning new images of Hebes Chasma, the 'Grand Canyon' of Mars, have been captured in 3D by the European Space Agency's Mars Express. This valley is a strange 196-mile (315km) scar that sits almost right in the middle of the Martian equator on the northern edge of the Valles Marineris canyon, almost 8 km-deep trough stretching 315 km in an east-west direction and 125 km from north to south at its widest point. Continue reading for the video and more information.
A group of physicists have just published a description of a quantum black hole, which uses loop quantum gravity where the predictions of physics-ending singularities vanish, and are replaced by bridges to another universe. In other words, in place of the black hole is something that resembles an entry point to another universe. Continue reading for two videos and more information.
UCSD (Uiversity of California, San Diego) have created a 3D-printed metal rocket engine using techniques previously only known to NASA, and successfully fired it at the Friends of Amateur Rocketry launch site in California's Mojave Desert. Gizmag says that it is the "first such test of a printed liquid-fueled, metal rocket engine by any university in the world and the first designed and printed outside of NASA." Continue reading for a video and more information.
