Though aging, the 23-year-old Hubble Space Telescope has a new assignment in the search for planets circling other stars. In October 2014 and February 2016, Hubble will take aim at Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the sun. Previous attempts to find planets around the red dwarf star, which lies 4.2 light years away, [...]

The Little Book of Space Law by Matthew J. Kleiman; ABA Book Publishing; Bolingbrook, Illinois; $19.95 (Regular)/$17.95 (American Bar Association Member); 2013. This is an excellent and very readable treatment regarding space law – the international and national laws that govern human activities in outer space. Plus, you’ll find a surprising gaggle of factoids and [...]

  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 [...]

Spacewalker – My Journey in Space and Faith as NASA’s Record-Setting Frequent Flyer by Jerry Ross with John Norberg; Purdue University Press, $29.95; 2013. As a former astronaut, Jerry Ross has written a personal account of his childhood in rural Indiana, then taking a career path that eventually led him into Earth orbit – not [...]

Three NASA shuttle-era astronauts, two of them women, were inducted into the U. S. Astronaut Hall of Fame on Saturday. Those honored in ceremonies at the Hall, close to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Fla., included Eileen Collins, the first woman to pilot and command a shuttle mission; Curt Brown, who served as [...]