SOFIA Observatory Taking Flight
It sounds almost like something a child would dream up -- scientists install a powerful telescope system in a Boeing 747 and fly it around taking infrared images of the sky. Well, that is exactly how the SOFIA observatory works. The Stratospheric Observatory For Infrared Astronomy was designed to study how planets and solar systems form. Also, because it is mobile, it will have the ability to capture interesting celestial events, since it can always be at the right place at the right time. So why put an infrared telescope on an aircraft? Wouldn't it make more sense to simply lau

Daughter Born While Father In Space
I have expressed to my wife several times that I think that it would be an amazing experience to travel to space, whether as a payload specialist on a NASA mission, or simply as a space tourist. Although she may not be crazy about the idea in general, she did make one thing clear; I better hope that I don't find myself in the same position that astronaut Randolph Bresnik found himself in this week. Because if I happen to be in space during the birth of one of our children, my wife, as she put it, "might have to kill" me. Interestingly, this is not the first time this has h

NASA To Irradiate Monkeys
Performing radiation tests on animals is not a new concept, but this will be the first time that NASA performs such tests on animals as evolved as monkeys. The key to the tests is to understand what the effects of deep space radiation -- at the levels astronauts would be exposed to while traveling to and from Mars -- will have on a human. NASA argues that the closer the test subject is to a human the better. Over the last couple weeks I have read a breadth of articles sounding off on the various animal rights issues, with most of the commentary being decidedly against t

"Strange" New Star?
Supernova remnants are beautiful to behold, but they are also the result of extremely violent explosions and leave behind one of the most dynamic objects in the Universe. One such object, the pulsar at the center of the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A (Cas A), has been the source of much study ever since data from the Chandra X-ray observatory were published over 10 years ago. Based on the observational data, the size of the pulsar -- a rapidly rotating neutron star -- was estimated to be about 6 miles across, which is theoretically impossible. Theories abounded, that this must not be a p

Water Found On The Moon
Back in October many of you were following the events of the LCROSS mission as the probe slamed into the Moon (on purpose), to look for traces of water. Well, after weeks of pouring over mountains of data, NASA has released their initial findings. And it turns out that the Moon contains more water than we once thought. NASA determined that the only way they could make sense of the data was if water was present on the Moon -- and a rather significant amount of water at that. This was not completely surprising however; several months ago, NASA determined that deep i