Sir Bernard Lovell, the astronomer, was among the team listening to transmissions coming from the area of space and began tracking the unmanned Soviet spacecraft Luna 15, which was trying to collect samples of lunar soil and rock and then return to Earth before the US mission. picked by kakana 5 months ago

The Cassini spacecraft will perform its closest flyby ever of Saturn's ice-spewing moon Enceladus early next year, moving directly into its icy polar geyser for a deep-space shower. picked by ogri2003 2 years ago

The firm Bigelow Aerospace has launched its second inflatable space module, Genesis 2, taking another step towards its goal of building crewed, inflatable space stations that could be leased to paying customers. picked by DrNothing 2 years ago

The planet-seeking Kepler spacecraft has beamed home its first images of a patch of the sky where NASA hopes to find Earth-like planets circling distant, alien stars. picked by AutumnLotus 7 months ago

Scientists are sifting through their first new views of the planet Mercury in more than three decades thanks to images beamed home by NASA's MESSENGER probe. The car-sized spacecraft zipped past Mercury in a Monday flyby and is relaying more than 1,200 new images and other data back to eager scientists on Earth. picked by AutumnLotus 2 years ago

A Russian Soyuz spacecraft has returned to Earth, but came down more than 400km (250 miles) away from its planned touchdown point, say Russian officials. picked by topofall 2 years ago

NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) spacecraft has made the first observations of very fast hydrogen atoms coming from the moon, following decades of speculation and searching for their existence. picked by AutumnLotus 5 months ago

As spacecraft began to launch on journeys to more distant planets, never to return, their mission controllers often commanded them to take departing views of Earth and the Moon. Mariner 10 and Voyager 1 both took such snapshots, as did Mars Odyssey, Venus Express, and many others. picked by AutumnLotus 2 years ago

The spacecraft ulysses, currently in the 18th year of its mission has encountered a glitch which may doom it to a frozen death in space. picked by xenity7 2 years ago

It can't really be described. picked by Mershaullk 2 years ago

The creator of SpaceShipOne, the first privately-financed craft to carry a human into space, traveled to New York to show detailed models of the bigger SpaceShipTwo and its carrier airplane, WhiteKnightTwo. picked by willster09 2 years ago

The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory is sending a spacecraft closer to the sun than any probe has ever gone – and what it finds could revolutionize what we know about our star and the solar wind that influences everything in our solar system. picked by AutumnLotus 2 years ago

The US spacecraft Dawn, due to launch on Sunday, will take a close look at two massive asteroids to try to penetrate the mystery of our solar system's origins 4.6 billion years ago. picked by AutumnLotus 2 years ago

Newly reprocessed images of the Moon's far side taken by Soviet spacecraft more than 40 years ago may have confirmed that the Moon's biggest impact scar was glimpsed far earlier than previously thought. picked by AutumnLotus 3 years ago

Pictures from NASA sent back by the Cassini spacecraft as it passed Saturn and its moons. Cassini has been functioning in space for almost five years now, and the pictures are awesome! picked by bingo 7 months ago

A spacecraft sent on a mission to inspect comets has filmed the Earth and its moon from 31 million miles away, making an alien's-eye view of our world. VIDEO picked by AutumnLotus 1 year ago

A NASA probe has begun beaming back stunning new images from its successful second flyby of Mercury, the planet closest to the sun. NASA's MESSENGER probe captured never-before-seen views of the Mercury during its encounter on Monday. picked by AutumnLotus 1 year ago

Scientists using data from the recently-Moon-smacked Kaguya spacecraft have found evidence of radioactive elements on the lunar surface, including, for the first time, uranium! picked by AutumnLotus 5 months ago

As pretty much any reader of this blog who isn't a total idiot must have figured out by now, I'm a geek. I have been since I was a kid. My dad taught me about bell curves and standard deviations when I was in third grade, and I thought it was pretty much the coolest damn thing I'd ever seen. That's the kind of kid I was. I was also very small - 5 foot 1 when I started high school. picked by Bornbad 4 months ago

Planets may be present in a quadruple star system 150 light years from Earth, according to Spitzer Space Telescope observations. The system, called HD 98800, consists of two pairs of stars in which the partners in each pair orbit one another closely. The pairs themselves travel around each other on a very elongated path. picked by AutumnLotus 2 years ago