Plans to robotically capture and corral a small asteroid into a stable lunar orbit so it can be explored byU. S.astronauts as early as 2021 got a chilly reception as the strategy was outlined Tuesday before the House Space Subcommittee, a NASA oversight panel. The lawmakers and a panel of experts that included [...]

  Dr. Sally Ride, American’s first female astronaut, will be honored posthumously with the Presidential Medal of Freedom at the White House later this year, President Obama announced Monday.   The announcement coincided with a tribute to Ride on Monday night at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. Ride, who [...]

NASA researchers have reported the biggest explosion on the lunar surface in the 8 year history of a Moon-monitoring program. The object was about the size of a small boulder and struck in the Moon’s Mare Imbrium, creating a flash nearly 10 times as bright as anything specialists had recorded before. The impact took place [...]

  NASA’s four year Kepler mission to search thousands of stars in the Milky Way galaxy for sun-like stars with planets that resemble the Earth has encountered a serious technical problem. A second of the four rapidly spinning internal “reaction wheels” that aim and steady the observatory has stopped turning, NASA announced late Wednesday. At [...]

This set of images from cameras on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter documents the appearance of a new cluster of impact craters on Mars. The orbiter has imaged at least 248 fresh craters, or crater clusters, on Mars.Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/Univ. of Arizona The two upper images are from the orbiter’s Context Camera (CTX). Researchers investigated the [...]