If it were possible to breath in space, one would smell a pungent aroma of rotten eggs, ammonia, vinegary sulphur dioxide and toxic hydrogen cyanide coming from comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, according to sensors on the Rosetta mission.
The European Space Agency’s first foray into science fiction, in the form of a short film entitled Ambition that promotes the Rosetta mission, may herald a new way in which science outreach can be conducted.
China launched a demonstrator probe Thursday on a round-trip flight around the Moon to test out a heat shield and landing capsule planned for use on a lunar sample return mission in 2017.
A partial eclipse of the Sun is set to wow North Americans this afternoon (23 October) as the Moon’s silhouette will be seen to cover as much as 50 percent of the Sun from the USA, and up to 80 percent of the Sun in northern Canada.
A fleet of robotic spacecraft orbiting Mars got a front row seat to space history Sunday and lived to tell about it, giving scientists their first close-up look at a comet fresh from a cloud of primordial mini-worlds at the outer reaches of the solar system.
Scientists using the powerful Hubble Space Telescopes have identified three tiny objects at the frontier of the solar system that NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft could visit after making an historic flyby of Pluto next summer.