Space Station Threshold

A new camera that will assist farmers, ranchers, foresters and educators is heading to the International Space Station. Students and faculty from the University of North Dakota built the Agricultural Camera, known as AgCam, which will be delivered by Space Shuttle Endeavour on the STS-126 mission to the ISS. The astronauts will [...]

While the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft wends its way to the Moon with gradually longer elliptical loops around the Earth, mission scientists decided to test out the main camera on board, the Terrain Mapping camera (TMC). The camera snapped this picture of Earth on October 29, 2008, at a distance of 70,000 km, showing Australia. [...]

If you are an astronomer looking for a habitable exoplanet orbiting a far-off star, what do you look for? We know from personal experience that we need oxygen and water to live on Earth, so this is a good place to start; look for exoplanets with the spectroscopic signature of O2 and H2O. But this [...]

Is the ozone hole was recovering? Maybe not. The protective atmospheric layer of ozone around our planet has been thinning over Antarctica for many years. New satellite data indicates the 2008 ozone hole is larger both in size and ozone loss than 2007 but is not as large as the record year [...]

Apparently, on December 21st 2012, our planet will experience a powerful event. This time we're not talking about Planet X, Nibiru or a "killer" solar flare, this event will originate deep within the core of our planet, forcing a catastrophic change in our protective magnetic field. Not only will we notice a rapid reduction in [...]

Hurricane Ike is bearing down on the US gulf coast, and even before landfall, is causing problems. Nearly 1 million people along the Texas coast have been ordered to evacuate, the other 3 million people in the Houston metro area have been asked not to leave, in hopes of avoiding the panic of three years [...]

The launch of ESA's GOCE satellite (the 'sexy' spacecraft) will be delayed. During launch preparations yesterday (Sunday, Sept. 7) a problem was discovered with a guidance and navigation subsystems on the launch vehicle's upper stage. To fix the problem, guidance and navigation unit will have to be replace. The upper stage, ...

OK, I've just wasted an hour in simulated space, checking out some of the active and junked satellites orbiting our planet. Google Earth can be an addictive thing at the best of times, but when 13,000 of the satellites in Earth orbit can be viewed by a new plug-in for the program, you may find [...]

This has to be the sexiest looking spacecraft ever built by humankind. No, it's not a starship or battle cruiser (although it does look a little like the Eagle spacecraft from the old television show Space: 1999). This sleek, slender, sexy, shiny and sophisticated spacecraft is an Earth-orbiting satellite that will investigate our [...]

Envisat satellite observations from mid-August show that a new record of low polar sea-ice coverage in the Arctic could be reached in sometime in September. This follows last summer's record minimum ice cover in the same area. Current ice coverage in the Arctic has already reached the second absolute minimum since observations from [...]