Asteroid to make close pass by Earth today

For those anxiously awaiting December 21, 2012, here’s a little thriller for you. In a few hours, an asteroid (named 2012 QG42) the size of three football fields will be making a close pass by Earth. We would have warned you earlier but, eh, the astronomy geeks just spotted it a few weeks ago.

It’s official, there is enough wind on the plane to supply all the world’s power requirements. Affordability however, is an altogether different matter.

NASA spacecraft have captured pictures of a huge filament of super-hot plasma being ejected from the Sun on August 31, 2012. The Sun is approaching a period of peak activity (in 2013) and coronal mass ejections (CME’s) such as this may become more common. NASA estimates the size of the eruption as 186,000 miles long…

The pictures below look like they were taken by a multi-billion dollar NASA satellite but these photos were actually taken by a 19-year-old teenager using a camera attached to a helium-filled balloon. Adam Cudworth, from the United Kingdom made his aerial device in just under 40 hours using a insulated box, GPS tracker…

The $2.5 billion dollar, nuclear powered Mars Curiosity Rover is not autonomous. On Earth, NASA engineers manually drive the robot around the surface of Mars. If you are picturing a NASA geek, red hand clinched tightly around a joystick, with a ear-to-ear grin – you’d only be partially correct. Driving Curiosity is not done in…

Scientists have just generated the world’s fastest laser light pulse, a beam that shoots for 67 attoseconds, or 0.000000000000000067 seconds. Such a quick burst is useful for allowing scientists to view extremely fast quantum mechanical processes, such as movement of electrons during chemical reactions. According to Wired magazine: To achieve their record-setting blast, the researchers…

Two separate sightings on Monday indicate something big happened on Jupiter. Two astronomers reported seeing a bright flash on the surface of Jupiter on Monday at 6:35 AM CDT. One astronomer, George Hall from Dallas, recorded the event which set the astronomer community abuzz.

On sol 33 (the 33rd Martian day), as one of the last steps in its inspection process, the Mars Curiosity Rover removed the clear dust cover from its camera lens (and put it back on for lens protection). The difference in picture clarity is remarkable. The pictures below were taken about five feet above the…

Curiosity Rover has certainly left its mark on the planet Mars. Photos taken by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have been released showing the tire tracks left by Curiosity on the planet’s surface. The bluish color spots are where Curiosity landed (named Bradbury landing after famous science fiction writer, Ray Bradbury) blowing Mars dust away from…

Scientists have discovered a strange star that is not aging normally and seems to remain every youthful. In the picture below, the glowing cluster of stars in the center (known as the “globular cluster”) are all stars that astronomers think formed in the universe’s distant past. Astronomers can determine a star’s age by the presence…