European Space Agency’s Rosetta/Philae mission to land on a comet

It may sound like science fiction but alas, this is really about to happen. On November 11, 2014, the European Space Agency (ESA) will land a small robotic spaceship, known as Philae, on a comet. It will be the first comet landing in the history of mankind. Here’s how it will happen…

Scientists have discovered a new planet that weighs 17 times as much as Earth. Dubbed the “Godzilla of Earths” (officially known by its more boring name – Kepler-10c), the planet is a new type of huge and rocky alien world that is about 560 light-years from Earth. Scientists have always thought that a planet the…

In any other circumstance, a huge, red, festering blemish would be a bad thing but not for the planet Jupiter. Jupiter’s Great Red Spot has been a defining characteristic since man began looking at the stars through bamboo shoots. But that may be about to change. NASA says that Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is shrinking…

The European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) will be more powerful than any telescope on earth. Its huge mirror will measure 39.3 meters and require microscopic precision to align the 800 hexagon-shaped pieces of mirror it will take to construct the telescope. E-ELT will be more than three times larger than any telescope on the planet!

Saturn has more than 60 moons and researchers said yesterday that they think they may have captured a photo of Saturn giving birth to another itty-biddy moon (which they named “Peggy”).

A visitor to the lab once asked Geek Slop how big space was and the lab tour had to be cancelled. In short, Geek Slop answered with “really, really, really big” but what he really did was add a bunch of “reallys” to make the point that space was “really big”. There were so many…

Scientists had long thought that Saturn’s moon Enceladus had an ocean of liquid water underneath its thick, icy surface (in 2004, NASA scientists saw water vapor and ice spewing from vents near the moon’s south pole). Today. NASA’s Cassini spacecraft revealed actual evidence that their guess was correct – an ocean lies hidden inside the…

It’s one year old and to celebrate the milestone, North Korea has rolled out a new logo for their space program called, and we’re not kidding here – NADA (as in Spanish for “nothing”). Not surprisingly, the logo is almost a direct copy of NASA’s iconic emblem (see below).

Like Jupiter, Saturn is a large, gaseous planet composed mostly of the gases hydrogen and helium. Saturn has a magnetic field 1,000 times stronger than Earth’s but not as strong as Jupiter’s. Due to its gaseous nature, Saturn’s density is so low that it could float in an ocean of water. It probably has a…

Our Sun is an ordinary star although it is quite large compared to other stars. In terms of “mass”, most stars have less than half the mass of our Sun. You could fit 109 Earths across the Sun. The Romans called the Sun “sol” (as in SOlar).