Space : Science World Report

Apr 16, 2012 07:11 AM EDT

Shanghai At Night: A Growing City

The city of Shanghai sits along the delta banks of the Yangtze River along the eastern coast of China. The city proper is the world's most populous city (the 2010 census counts 23 million people, including "unregistered" residents). With that many humans, the city is a tremendous sight at night.

Apr 16, 2012 06:57 AM EDT

Lower North Fork Fire Burn Scar

The Lower North Fork Fire began on March 26, 2012 when firefighters lost control of a planned burn in Foxton, Colorado, an unincorporated town southwest of Denver.

Apr 14, 2012 04:26 PM EDT

Designing the Interplanetary Web

Reliable Internet access on the Moon, near Mars or for astronauts on a space station? How about controlling a planetary rover from a spacecraft in deep space? These are just some of the pioneering technologies that ESA is working on for future exploration missions.

Apr 14, 2012 03:57 PM EDT

Hubble Sees Messier 70: Tight and Bright

In this image, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured the brilliance of the compact center of Messier 70, a globular cluster. Quarters are always tight in globular clusters, where the mutual hold of gravity binds together hundreds of thousands of stars in a small region of space. Having th...

Apr 14, 2012 03:45 PM EDT

Scientist Beams up a Real "Star Trek" Tricorder

Starships, warp speed, transporters, phasers. Think "Star Trek" technology is only the stuff of fiction? Think again.

Apr 13, 2012 04:32 PM EDT

NASA's Swift Monitors Departing Comet Garradd

An outbound comet that provided a nice show for skywatchers late last year is the target of an ongoing investigation by NASA's Swift satellite. Formally designated C/2009 P1 (Garradd), the unusually dust-rich comet provides a novel opportunity to characterize how cometary activity changes at ever gr...

Apr 13, 2012 01:45 PM EDT

AGU: Uranus Auroras Glimpsed from Earth

For the first time, scientists have captured images of auroras above the giant ice planet Uranus, finding further evidence of just how peculiar a world that distant planet is. Detected by means of carefully scheduled observations from the Hubble Space Telescope, the newly witnessed Uranian light sho...

Apr 13, 2012 11:20 AM EDT

Yuri Gagarin â€“ Hero of the Soviet Union and First Ambassador to the Cosmos

On 12 April 1961 marks the 51st anniversary of one of the most historic moments in human history. It was on this day in 1961, that Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to take a journey into outer space. Aboard his Vostok spacecraft, not only did Gagarin become the first person in sp...

Apr 13, 2012 10:34 AM EDT

Astronomers Discover Sandstorms in Space

Writing in Nature, the team of researchers used new techniques which allowed them to look into the atmospheres of distant, dying stars.

Apr 13, 2012 10:23 AM EDT

Teamwork: IBEX and TWINS Observe a Solar Storm

On April 5, 2010, the sun spewed a two million-mile-per-hour stream of charged particles toward the invisible magnetic fields surrounding Earth, known as the magnetosphere. As the particles interacted with the magnetic fields, the incoming stream of energy caused stormy conditions near Earth. Some s...

Apr 13, 2012 09:04 AM EDT

Webb Science: The End of the Dark Ages: First Light and Reionization

Until around 400 million years after the Big Bang, the Universe was a very dark place. There were no stars, and there were no galaxies. Scientists would like to unravel the story of exactly what happened after the Big Bang. The James Webb Space Telescope will pierce this veil of mystery and reveal...

Apr 13, 2012 06:59 AM EDT

Do Solar Storms Cause Heat Waves on Earth?

Although solar flares, and associated coronal mass ejections, can bombard Earth's outermost atmosphere with tremendous amounts of energy, most of that energy is reflected back into space by the Earth's magnetic field. Because the energy does not reach our planet's surface, it has no measurable influ...