NASA Updates Target Launch Date for Shuttle Discovery

NASA released a synopsis Friday announcing plans to issue an announcement for proposals for the commercial use of Launch Pad 39A at the agency's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The announcement is expected next week.

(Phys.org) —Engineers developing NASA's next-generation rocket closed one chapter of testing with the completion of a J-2X engine test series on the A-2 test stand at the agency's Stennis Space Center in ...

A Soyuz space capsule with a three-man crew returning from a five-month mission to the International Space Station landed safely Tuesday on the steppes of Kazakhstan.

(Phys.org) —With a historic robotic refueling demo ticked off its checklist, NASA's Robotic Refueling Mission (RRM) put down the hose and picked up the screwdriver and utility knife. This latest round of ...

Scheming to rearrange the heavens, scientists are busy planning how to pluck, push and park a spinning asteroid between here and the moon. While most of us hope to dodge space rocks, NASA has unveiled an ambitious, $105 million ...

Landing astronauts safely on Mars is one of the biggest technological hurdles for any future manned mission to the Red Planet, even more complicated than last year's daring rover touchdown.

Sometime in the next quarter-century, NASA plans to send the first humans to Mars, a mission that will push the boundaries of teamwork for a handful of astronauts who will spend as long as three years together ...

In April, when the Hubble Space Telescope looked out towards Jupiter's orbit and observed what has been billed as the "Comet of the Century" – Comet C/2012 S1 ISON – the space telescope photographed a ...

Two months ago, on March 17th, 2013, a small space rock weighing just 88 pounds (40kg), travelling at 56,000 miles per hour, smashed into the lunar surface creating a flash so bright that viewers looking at the Moon at the ...

A team of researchers from Germany, Italy, and the USA have shown that observations of stellar visibility by citizen scientists accurately measure the brightness of the night sky. The researchers published their results Thursday ...

(Phys.org) —Nanosatellites now have their own mass transit to catch rides to space and perform experiments in microgravity. A new NASA-designed and developed satellite deployer, dubbed the Nano Launch Adapter ...

(Phys.org) —Scientists will seek to gain answers to these questions with the launch of the Cosmic Infrared Background ExpeRIment (CIBER) on a Black Brant XII suborbital sounding rocket between 11 and 11:59 ...