Launched four year ago, NASA’s Kepler space telescope is narrowing an unprecedented search for alien planets similar to the Earth. On Thursday, astronomers announced the discovery of three “Super Earths” circling in the habitable zones of two distant stars, one of them quite like the sun. Than means liquid water, an essential ingredient for [...]

An international effort including Europe, the United States and Japan is focused on protecting the global satellite network from Sun-driven space weather. Satellites can be damaged by high energy charged particles in the Earth’s radiation belts, and during solar energetic particle (SEP) events. With the growing reliance on satellite services, new vulnerabilities to space weather [...]

  Observations with NASA’s Spitzer space telescope and the European Space Agency’s Herschel Space Observatory have detected  familiar looking asteroid/cometary belts around Vega, a young star and one of the brightest objects in the northern night sky. The band of small objects near Vega, separated by a gap, then followed by a second band of [...]

    Space technology can be as much about improving life on Earth as exploring new worlds. Robonaut 2, the first humanoid in space and a joint effort between NASA and automaker GM, has been living aboard the International Space Station for more than a year. There, engineers are exploring ways to make interactions between [...]

Saturn’s moon Titan provides the best opportunity to study conditions very similar to Earth – in terms of climate, meteorology and astrobiology. That’s the observation from Athena Coustenis from the Paris-Meudon Observatory in France. The scientist is presenting this perspective today at the European Planetary Science Congress in Madrid. Titan is a “unique world on [...]