Novel nanomaterials developed at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute are scheduled to blast off into orbit on November 16 aboard Space Shuttle Atlantis. The project, funded by the U.S. Air Force Multi University Research Initiative (MURI), seeks to test the performance of the new nanocomposites in orbit. Space Shuttle Atlantis will carry the samples to the International Space Station (ISS). The mater...

When NASA`s space shuttle Atlantis launches for the International Space Station on Nov. 16 it will carry a University of Colorado at Boulder butterfly experiment that will be monitored by thousands of K-12 students across the nation. The butterfly payload was designed and built by BioServe Space Technologies in CU-Boulder`s aerospace engineering department and will carry two butterfly habitats con...

Flying high over the Gulf of Mexico, researchers from NASA and Case Western Reserve University found a key to unlocking oxygen from the surface of the moon. The celestial body has no atmosphere like Earth`s, holding the precious element just a breath away. But, oxygen to breathe, grow food, create water and burn rocket fuel – to make a space outpost a reality – is trapped in its soils....

One small step for mankind is now a leap for averting natural and man-made disasters on earth. New Tel Aviv University technology combines sophisticated sensors in orbit with sensors on the ground and in the air to create a "Hyperspectral Remote Sensor" (HRS). It can give advance warnings about water contamination after a forest fire, alert authorities of a pollution spill long before a ...

What the World Wide Web is to humans, the Triple Space could become for machines, say European researchers who have helped lay the foundations for this innovative integration of web services, semantic web and tuple space technologies. As a new form of network-based, machine-machine communication, the roll out of Triple Space technology heralds a new era for the internet in which computers are able...

According to a new study by geologists at the University of Toronto and the University of Maryland, the wealth of some minerals that lie in the rock beneath the Earth`s surface may be extraterrestrial in origin. "The extreme temperature at which the Earth`s core formed more than four billion years ago would have completely stripped any precious metals from the rocky crust and deposited them i...

Researchers are developing a new type of rocket propellant made of a frozen mixture of water and "nanoscale aluminum" powder that is more environmentally friendly than conventional propellants and could be manufactured on the moon, Mars and other water-bearing bodies. The aluminum-ice, or ALICE, propellant might be used to launch rockets into orbit and for long-distance space missions an...

NASA`s Spitzer Space Telescope has discovered an enormous ring around Saturn — by far the largest of the giant planet`s many rings. The new belt lies at the far reaches of the Saturnian system, with an orbit tilted 27 degrees from the main ring plane. The bulk of its material starts about six million kilometers (3.7 million miles) away from the planet and extends outward roughly another 12 m...

A newly released set of images, taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope before the recent Servicing Mission, highlight the ongoing drama in two galaxies in the Virgo Cluster affected by a process known as "ram pressure stripping", which can result in peculiar-looking galaxies. An extremely hot X-ray emitting gas known as the intra-cluster medium lurks between galaxies within cluster...

The first Swiss satellite in history — extremely small and 100 percent student designed and built — has been successfully launched from the Sriharikota space station in India. Constructed by the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, with many institutional partners, the SwissCube has gone into orbit. Those who worked on it adhered to extremely precise requirements for...