Tag Archives: NASA

Mars’ core is larger and less dense than we thought.

Thanks to El Niño and climate change, last year broke temperature records – and reduces any importance attached to the global warming 'hiatus.'

With water availability plummeting, Pakistan is close to being declared a water scare country, but better management of surface water resources and groundwater aquifers shared with India can help avert the crisis.

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft phoned home just before 9 p.m. EDT Tuesday (July 14) to tell the mission team and the world it had accomplished the historic first-ever flyby of Pluto.

The United States took the first step on its long journey to Mars when the Orion spacecraft blasted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on its inaugural test flight. But Orion’s first test flight represents much more than an opportunity to collect data and refine spacecraft design; it represents the return of American leadership and ambition on the final frontier.

The adoption of any new aircraft technology – from research, to design sketches, to testing and full integration – is typically a decade-long process. Given that the combustion engine will be phased out by mid-century, it would seem to make more economic and environmental sense to innovate in other areas: airframe design, materials research, electric propulsion design and air traffic control.

Despite its overall success, the ten-year space journey to an icy dirtball wasn’t without concerns and small failures.

In the decades since the last Moon landing in 1972, America’s horizons have shrunk and withered. Human spaceflight remains a core American success, but it has lost direction and, since the retirement of the space shuttle in 2011, basic capability.