Last week , I told you we would show you a new map of Mercury based on the January MESSENGER flyby. Here it is, kindly provided by one of NASA’s master mappers, Robert Gaskell of the Planetary Science Institute in Altadena, California. This image is an anaglyph — a flat image that simulates a three-dimensional view — of the fault scarp Beagle Rupes as it cuts across the crater Sveinsdóttir. The area shown here is about 160 miles (257 kilometers) square...

NASA’s lone gunmen say they have designed a better, safer, cheaper version of the Ares I crew launcher (above), one of the cornerstones of the post-Shuttle space program. NASA Remember the “ lone gunmen ,” the trio of militantly nonconformist Uber-geeks on The X-Files who tracked government conspiracies? It appears NASA’s got an infestation of them, too. In a story this week by Jay Reeves of the Associated Press , I learned of a merry band of dissident...

NASA engineers have proposed a mission to an asteroid threatening Earth. Bruce Damer (DigitalSpace) I’m happy to report NASA may be planning to do more about the as-yet unaddressed asteroid threat to Earth than helplessly watch giant space rocks whiz by the home planet from time to time. The Guardian , a British newspaper, reported recently that some NASA scientists have written a report outlining a mission to asteroid 2000SG344. The object is about...

This just in from the hydrocarbon desk at Astronomy.com: Titan’s surface lakes and methane-ice-laden dune seas collectively hold hundreds of times Earth’s bounty of hydrocarbons (oil and gas). It’s a Texas oilman’s dream: hydrocarbons rain from the sky on Titan. To my mind, this could solve a lot of problems. Planetary scientists have been competing with NASA’s fantastically expensive manned space program for decades. Word on the aerospace street...

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 IEEE Spectum Online . "A great leap for womankind," notes Yahoo! News . You get the idea. This raises a complicated question. Is this kind of...

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 operated 5 years past its planned mission, but repeated and worsening malfunctions in its pointing system rendered FUSE inoperable. In several decades...