On Friday's edition of The Lead with Jake Tapper, Emmy-winning reporter Tom Foreman (also the guy with that hologram sheep) took the risk of Fantastic Voyage-style interactions with several dangerous asteroids. When we say Fantastic Voyage-style, by the way, we mean "predicated on corny special effects."
At around 5 p.m. Eastern on Friday, a massive asteroid named 1998 QE2 will zoom by Earth at a relatively close distance. And as exciting as that may be for space nerds, this thing had better keep it's distance: The rock is 2,000 feet across and could wipe out Virginia if it didn't — and that's just its moon.
If there's any phrase an astronaut never wants to mutter, it's "Houston, we have a problem." Calling from the International Space Station on Thursday evening, Commander Chris Hadfield did just that.
The House convened yet another hearing on Thursday, this time with some of the smartest space people in the country, to check in and see if they've found us a new planet to live on. And we're still a ways away from life on Earth 2, but the first thing the scientists need is a gigantic telescope.
If you thought the Mars One mission (a.k.a. the one-way ticket to the Red Planet in the name of reality TV) sounded oddly appealing, you were hardly alone. Newly released numbers show that the contest has already garnered almost 80,000 applications.
Nearly a decade after Richard Branson founded the space tourism wing of his Virgin empire and more than three years after he unveiled the ship that will get humans into the suborbital vacation business, SpaceShipTwo has proven itself ready for liftoff.
A summary of the best reads found behind the paywall of The New York Times.
Scientists at the European Space Agency have released the "oldest" picture we have of our universe, revealing a map of cosmic radiation that shows what our skies looked like at the very earliest moments of creation.
Reddit's Ask Me Anything feature is often fun because it enables regular old Redditors to talk to really cool famous people like the president or, as was the on Sunday, an astronaut orbiting the Earth.
So, after yesterday's Russian meteor, and the asteroid passing that could have leveled an entire city, we thought the brief "space stuff falling from the sky" trend was over. But that's not the case. The U.S. just needed to have its own meteor sighting.
A 10-ton meteor blazed through the sky and struck Central Russia this morning, leaving nearly 1,000 people injured along with a goosebump-inducing sonic boom that provided an amazing collection of videos from citizens who caught the whole thing on tape.
Good news, Earthlings! The day after Valentine's Day a 150-foot-wide asteroid will fly so close to our planet that it will pass through the orbit of several satellites, but experts said on Thursday that it will not hit us.
Iran claims that it sent a living organism into space for the first time ever, without help from any other countries, and brought it back alive.
Just over a week after astronomers boldly announced that they would discover an Earth twin elsewhere in the universe within the year, NASA's Kepler telescope spotted a pretty good candidate.
With the Mayan apocalypse fast approaching (two weeks!), a NASA senior scientist has reassured the world that the space agency isn't hiding any intel on the order of the universe and its impending implosion December 21.
Scattered reports from South Korea say that its neighbors north of the 38th parallel have finished assembling a long-range rocket and are enthusiastically prepping the launch pad.
There are a lot of reasons to be excited about NASA's plan to send yet another rover to land on the Red Planet in 2020. But don't kid yourself. You wish it were a human heading to Mars instead.
After building us up and letting us down easy about that alleged discovery "for the history books" from Curiosity, NASA has announced the next best thing in space right now: we found water ice on Mercury. And a lot of it.
Astronomers are reeling over the discovery of an exoplanet orbiting Alpha Centauri B, a member of the closest star system to Earth.
Daredevil parachutist Felix Baumgartner survived his attempt to break the record for the highest sky dive ever today. He did it. He really did it.
Despite some clouds and a slight chance of rain, SpaceX's first ever official mission went off without a hitch in Cape Canaveral on Sunday evening.
Every day The Atlantic Wire highlights the video clips that truly earn your five minutes (or less) of attention.
Every day The Atlantic Wire highlights the video clips that truly earn your five minutes (or less) of attention.
Landing on Mars isn't cool. You know what's cool? Landing on Mars in HD.
The Curiosity rover has barely settled into its new home, but may be getting some company soon as India now says it wants to get into the Mars exploration business.
Discovered: Space, brought to you in 3D; thin diabetics worse off than overweight ones; for some women, giving birth is a traumatic event; Nipah virus can be prevented in monkeys.
While the United States was still in the afterglow of landing the Curiosity rover on Mars, a world away, Russians added another chapter of failure to their sad space program as a faulty rocket stranded two unrecoverable satellites in low orbit.
Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, died yesterday of pancreatic cancer. She was also, you may have heard by now, gay.
Discovered: Titan shows marks of a river network; a potential black hole in the heart of the Milky Way; poverty can cause mothers to develop anxiety; windows that generate electricity.
Discovered: Yes, even the iciest place on the planet is warm, Zebra fish are just the best, a very inconvenient way to save a worm's life, and the fastest camera uses its powers for good.
Discovered: Mars has tons of water, space's new planets are too close for comfort, elephant seals make good scientists, and fructose (sugar!) could be healthy, after all.
In today's tour of state-sponsored propaganda: lady astronauts have it hard, Egypt TV smears Tahrir Square activists and Saudi Arabia mourns the death of a crown prince.
Discovered: A promising first trial for the Alzheimer's vaccine, the science of cool, gastric bypass really works, and the very first space things.
Space tourism is closer to reality now that Virgin Galactic was finally issued permits to test its rocket-powered space plane.
As the first human to walk on the moon, Neil Armstrong is a popular target for interviews; a request that he almost never grants. So you can imagine why people are perplexed that he agreed to a full one-hour sit down interview with the head of the Certified Practicing Accountants of Australia.
Discovered: How the Mississippi saved the gulf from total ruin, the Milky Way is full of planets, the risks of not going on The Pill, smoking while pregnant is still bad.
Discovered: A potentially delicious weight-loss solution, an artificial leaf that can save us from climate change, biodiversity is our next environmental issue, and a big pretty picture of a ball of old stars.
All these reporters were haters about Newt Gingrich's vision for a moon colony, and now they're tweeting about the space shuttle like nerdy NASA-cap wearing third graders.
This morning Washington D.C. residents watched the soon to be retired Discovery shuttle on its planned tour of the city before its final flight to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum's Virginia annex, where it will sit on display.
Discovered: The first image of one billion stars, a new high for Autism diagnoses, some fishing advice and Lucy's cousins.
Chilean technicians exploded the top off of Las Campanas Peak in the Atacama Desert to begin the construction of a telescope ten times as powerful as the Hubble on Friday morning.
It's difficult not to get excited about the future of space travel, especially when the Obama administration starts boasting about how it will help stimulate the economy.
What would you do if you had a few hundred million dollars to burn? Whatever you did, you'd certainly never stash it all in a savings account, right?
Discovered: Venus has bad weather, women like men to feel their pain, how much water the Earth has lost, cancerless super mice, and how to change your DNA.
Every day The Atlantic Wire highlights the video clips that truly earn your five minutes (or less) of attention.
After a long day spent staring at Twitter, we're sharing out favorite tweets that didn't make sense.
Discovered: Mars's ocean, it's OK to eat cake for breakfast, giving the middle finger is harder than it looks.
If Newt Gingrich won South Carolina because of one of his most indefensible ideas -- ending child labor laws so that poor kids can become janitors in their own schools -- it's interesting that he's being killed in Florida over one of his most defensible ones: space exploration.
Discovered: Best photo of the Earth, ever, what technology is doing to young girls, the super-flu isn't so super after-all, party hosts party hardest, eating marine mammals is a thing.
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