The commanders of both space shuttle Discovery (STS-120) and the International Space Station (ISS), the two crewed spacecraft now in orbit, are women. So, this week in the interstellar media, headlines gush with a milestone in the annals of gender. "Women set to take charge of space," said...

At the veterinarian, they do it with an injection. When astronomers want to "put to sleep" one of their pets, they use a mouse click. Yesterday, astronomers at Johns Hopkins University shut down the Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE) satellite after 8 years of service. The craft...

The other week I wrote about an auction for those with celestial tastes . I've come across another space-themed auction. On October 28, Boston auctioneer Skinner will host a sale that includes several lots of NASA memorabilia. This auction features a Mercury 7 astronaut's test glove with pen...

I'm in Orlando, Florida, attending the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences. This is where the world's planetary scientists report their latest findings. One of the meeting's traditions is "NASA Night," where the space agency's...

When asked about the importance of beating the Soviet Union to the Moon, then Vice President Lyndon Johnson replied, "What American wants to go to bed by the light of a Communist Moon?" Of course, unless you are a conspiracy nut, you know the United States landed a dozen men on the Moon, including...

On September 11, 2007, NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity entered Victoria Crater on the rover's 1,291st martian day, or sol. NASA/JPL-Caltech Note to carmakers: Find out who the people were who built those fantastic rovers on Mars and hire them. They know how to make electric vehicles...

Astronomers meet this week in Washington to discuss the future of Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, the largest radio telescope in the world. The leading item on the agenda is how to prevent the telescope — 1,000 feet wide (300 meters) — from going to the scrap yard. In November 2006, the National...

It is just a routine NASA press release, but one with a sort of "beginning of the beginning of the end" feel to it: "NASA and Internet Archive of San Francisco are partnering to scan, archive and manage the agency's vast collection of photographs, historic film and video. The imagery...

In a recent blog , I talked about the surprising difficulty of landing heavy crewed payloads on Mars — in fact, its present impossibility, in lieu of new technologies. That's a very big challenge to future Mars exploration, although not at all insurmountable. But what about the dumb stuff? The little...

Phoenix's robotic arm digs a trench in the ice-rich martian soil, seeking signs as to whether Mars may be hospitable to life. Corby Waste (JPL) If the weather holds along Florida's Atlantic coast, NASA's Phoenix spacecraft should blast off from Cape Canaveral this Saturday. Its target: the...