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...

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...

Astronomers meet this week in Washington to discuss the future of Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, the largest radio telescope in the world. The leading item on the agenda is how to prevent the telescope — 1,000 feet wide (300 meters) — from going to the scrap yard. In November 2006, the National...

It is just a routine NASA press release, but one with a sort of "beginning of the beginning of the end" feel to it: "NASA and Internet Archive of San Francisco are partnering to scan, archive and manage the agency's vast collection of photographs, historic film and video. The imagery...

In a recent blog , I talked about the surprising difficulty of landing heavy crewed payloads on Mars — in fact, its present impossibility, in lieu of new technologies. That's a very big challenge to future Mars exploration, although not at all insurmountable. But what about the dumb stuff? The little...

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...

As NASA engineers prepare the gamma-ray observatory GLAST for launch in mid-2008, the agency has put out a call for help from the public: Please think of a better name for the high-tech space telescope. “Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope” aptly describes the satellite’s function, but doesn’t exactly...

Have NASA astronomers discovered the black hole in the Milky Way’s center where lost socks turn into X rays? Tune in next week to find out. Ute Kraus (Max-Planck-Institut für Gravitationsphysik) NASA has found something amazing in our galaxy. Unfortunately, it’s not saying just what it has found — until...

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...

Have you heard the news? Astronomers have observed the early phase of an exploding star. It’s 2008d, the “ supernova caught in the act .” If you are in the science media, you can’t help having heard about it. For days, we’ve been in the midst of a blitz that would make the Luftwaffe envious. Fortunately...