NASA Has Its Eye on JAXA's HTV
	NASA could soon start official negotiations with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency to buy H-2 Transfer Vehicles in order to fulfill its obligations of delivering water, food and materials for scientific experiments to the International Space Station after the space shuttle will be retired in the second half of 2010. Once the space shuttles are gone, NASA will have no means of making any space flight until 2015 when the Ares launch veh ... [read more >>]
	21 July 2008, 03:45GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

The Chinese Could Beat the Americans in the Race to the Moon
	According to NASA administrator Michael Griffin, the next manned mission to set foot on the Moon by the end of the next century might not be coordinated by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, but by China. Dr. Griffin further points out that if China wants to put a man on the Moon before the American space agency’s scheduled mission, then it is more than capable of doing so. China became the third nation in the world ever to ... [read more >>]
	15 July 2008, 09:53GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

NASA Creates the World's Highest Resolution Visualization System
	NASA unveiled last week the world's highest resolution visualization system, dubbed Hyperwall-2, an event that took place at the Ames Research Center. The new system isn't meant for commercial use and will serve the scientists over at NASA who need to study small details and specs featured in the very large datasets produced by the agency’s supercomputers. The system has been developed by scientists and engineers in ... [read more >>]
	30 June 2008, 05:29GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Houston, Willowbrook Mall Apple Store Grand Opening this Saturday
	Apple's Willowbrook Mall retail store is set to open its doors this Saturday, June 7, 2008 at 10:00 a.m. Apple itself has made it official on its website, saying it will be a Grand Opening. This means customers will at least nab a few giveaway items, although the company seems to have "forgotten" to mention wh ... [read more >>]
	04 June 2008, 16:11GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Create and Manage Your NASA Space Station
	NASA is getting more and more into video games and we truly hope that it won't completely change its business, even though we really like its projects so far: a Second Life island, plans for a MMO and ... [read more >>]
	30 May 2008, 02:54GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Soyuz Problems Traced to Faulty Separation Bolts
	As we already know, the last two Soyuz capsules used to return astronauts from the International Space Station executed 'ballistic' re-entries into Earth's atmosphere during descent, possibly endangering the lives of the crew they were carrying. As it turns out, both ships may have suffered from the same glitch that is possibly also plaguing the Soyuz-TMA-12 spacecraft now stationed at the ISS, expected to return the crew of ... [read more >>]
	26 May 2008, 07:09GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Invading Ants Set Houston Space Center on Fire
	A huge colony of ants is reportedly chewing its way to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, destroying computer networks and even cars. The invasion may pose a security risk for the space center, which relies on electronics for its research, and the government agency has already called for exterminator support. The "electronics-killing" ants are causing short circuits in computing systems located in both homes and offi ... [read more >>]
	16 May 2008, 03:07GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Next NASA Supercomputer Designed and Deployed by SGI
	The upcoming supercomputing cluster to coordinate NASA's missions on the Moon and Mars will be delivered by system manufacturer SGI. The famous agency has chosen to purchase a 20,480-core SGI Altix ICE system that will be installed this summer in the NASA Advanced Supercomputing facility at Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley. According to the space agency, the supercomputer will be able to deliver a total computing power of 245 ... [read more >>]
	07 May 2008, 02:53GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Nigerian Sent to Prison for Hacking NASA Computer
	Hacking computers has always been an illegal activity and, even if attackers risked harsh punishments, they continued to launch attacks on computers from all over the world. However, some of them get caught and once it happens, they probably regret all they did during their hacking "job". This is the case of a Nigerian hacker who was sentenced to 18 months in prison after he admitted having hacked a computer belonging t ... [read more >>]
	06 May 2008, 10:27GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

NASA Explains Free MMO Request
	We have already told you about NASA's desire to create an educational MMO for youngsters who want to learn more about space - back then, NASA said it had $3 million for the project, but things have changed a little bit and the project seems further away from becoming reality. L ... [read more >>]
	24 April 2008, 12:06GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Stephen Hawking Spoke at NASA's 50th Anniversary
	Renowned British physicist Stephen Hawking was invited yesterday to speak at NASA's 50th anniversary at Washington, DC. During his lecture, professor Hawking attacked the matters of Moon and Mars colonization, the underfunding of space exploration and the possibility of existence of alien life in the universe. He believes that the top priority of space exploration would by to create two permanent colonies on Mars and the Moo ... [read more >>]
	22 April 2008, 03:01GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

NASA's Constellation Program isn't Going Anywhere Soon
	Putting a man on the Moon in 1969 was easy. Putting a man on the Moon today is not. I, for one, don't understand the logic of it. Do we really have to mention Mars too? According to the congressional report on NASA's replacement of the space shuttle, the Constellation Program is in serious danger of failing even before the first spacecraft is even launched into space. The Constellation Program is scheduled to launch its first ... [read more >>]
	04 April 2008, 06:58GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

ATV to Dock with the Space Station Today
	The Automated Transfer Vehicle Jules Verne has completed successfully the both demonstration maneuvers scheduled to provide with a preview of the spacecraft's capabilities, and is expected to dock with the International Space Station today at 10:41 ET, without any intervention form the crew on board the space station or of the command centers on Earth. The ATV is carrying five tons of supplies for the crew of the space station, was bu ... [read more >>]
	03 April 2008, 03:31GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

NASA's Newest Concept Vehicle
	NASA's new lunar rover prototype is somehow different from the Martian rovers we are familiar with today. Unlike Spirit and Opportunity, NASA's Chariot will not conduct scientific missions. On the contrary, it will be used as a 'workhorse' on the lunar surface, building roads, trenches or as a drilling rig on the Moon. The build of the Chariot was completed in the month of September last year and has been into ... [read more >>]
	26 March 2008, 04:48GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

NASA Reverses Controversial Budget Cut
	Well, it seems that NASA 'did it again', so to say. Just recently the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, responsible for the Mars Exploration Rover program, was ordered to apply a budget cut of 4 million US dollars for the 2008 fiscal year. Yet another cut was scheduled for the 2009, totaling 8 million dollars of the budget for the rover program. However, NASA seems to have missed some details along the way. Upon the rece ... [read more >>]
	26 March 2008, 04:00GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Global Temperature in Google Earth
	Google Earth has always surprised us with the innovative functions implemented in it and it seems like the mapping solution will keep up the good work for a long time from now on. Although it doesn’t belong to the folks working at the Mountain View company, a new database is now available on the web, allowing Google Earth users to view the warming trend for certain cities around the world. The database was built by Ken Mankoff ... [read more >>]
	25 March 2008, 06:25GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Bad News for Twin Martian Rovers
	Although still healthy and working round the clock of the surface of the Red Planet, NASA's twin rovers Spirit and Opportunity may soon find themselves hibernating for a undefined amount of time. If mechanical and software problems won't disable them permanently, NASA will surely do so. According to a NASA Headquarters press release, the Mars Exploration Rover program operating the two robots will receive a budget cut o ... [read more >>]
	25 March 2008, 05:11GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Scientists to Broadcast the First Space Ad
	And as if we weren't all full of advertisements, someone had the bright idea to broadcast one into space. The campaign was initiated by the University of Leicester and is called Doritos 'You Make It, We Play It', which basically means that some lads in the United Kingdom will have the opportunity to create a 30 second advertisement in which to describe how they perceive the life on our planet. At the end of the pre ... [read more >>]
	10 March 2008, 04:48GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Jules Verne ATV Launch Delayed for March 9
	As it turns out, not only NASA has problems with the launch of its spacecraft. It seems that the European Space Agency is currently experiencing some technical difficulties with its Automated Transfer Vehicle, the Jules Verne, and will need to delay the launch sequence by one day in order to fix them. According to the ESA, the problems are related to the launcher separation system coordinating the ATV/Ariane 5 spacecraft. Jules Verne w ... [read more >>]
	03 March 2008, 09:08GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Laws of the Universe Not Working Properly Anymore?
	On the 2nd of March 1972, NASA launched the first of the spacecrafts in the Pioneer space exploration program, Pioneer 10. All went incredibly well, with only one exception. After traveling about 20 astronomical units, NASA engineers observed what seemed to be an anomalous Doppler effect suggesting that the spacecraft had deviated way of its course for no apparent reason. The incident became well known in popular science as the P ... [read more >>]
	01 March 2008, 03:59GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

NASA Presents the Ultimate Moon Rover
	NASA is finally talking business and is clearly determined to put a manned mission on the surface of the Moon within the next decade and, why not, to establish a lunar base on our only natural satellite. The new lunar rover demonstrated by the NASA team during the Space Exploration Conference, which took place between 26 and 28 February in Denver, will have the capability of searching for ice water and oxygen-rich soils on the arid surface ... [read more >>]
	28 February 2008, 09:12GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

NASA Creates the Highest Resolution Picture of the Moon
	The US are determined to put another manned mission on the surface of the Moon by 2020. The most likely landing location? The rim area of Shackleton Crater, near the South Pole. But, first, NASA has some probing to do with the help of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (which is due to launch in October this year) and ground based radar dishes. Yesterday, the US space agency released what is now the highest resolution image of the ... [read more >>]
	28 February 2008, 05:48GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

NASA Forced to Resort to Lunar Violence
	Ames Research Center principal investigator Tony Colaprete says that the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter which will be launched this year, at the end of October, will also carry a mission designed to study whether there is water on the Moon's poles. The so-called Lunar Crater and Observation Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, will release the Centaur impactor to crash into the Moon's surface, in a region close to the South Pole ... [read more >>]
	28 February 2008, 04:55GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

NASA to Make Mobile Phones Functional on the Moon
	Almost 40 years ago, the Apollo 11 mission allowed the first humans to land on the Moon (Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, on July 20, 1969), after a four days space trip, marking one of the most important achievements in the history of mankind. Now NAS ... [read more >>]
	22 February 2008, 06:26GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Firearms into Space?
	You would probably think that space is the last place in the universe where one may find a shotgun. Of course the possibility of that to ever happen is rather slim, but nonetheless it doesn't mean that firearms cannot be found into space. Russian Soyuz capsules have been routinely carrying guns into space for some decades now, even though there seems to be no practical justification for such an action. Now Moscow negotiating ... [read more >>]
	13 February 2008, 05:02GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Greatest Space Mission Footages Receive Cosmetic Makeover
	The task for such a major operation fell in the hands of the Discovery Channel, and will have the role to commemorate half of century of U.S. space agency activity. When ready, it will be presented in the popular "Planet Earth" series, under the form of a miniseries called "When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions", it will include never-before-seen sequences of film extracted from more than 500 hours of footage from NASA& ... [read more >>]
	06 February 2008, 10:01GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

MRO Finds Happy Face on Mars!
	Who said Martians are evil? Maybe they are trying to tell us something... I mean, just look at the evidence: happy face on Mars in 1999, happy face on Mars in 2006, Big Foot only a few days ago and, last but no least, happy face on Mars 2008. This particular image was taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Context Camera on the 28th of January, 2008, and is showing a 3-kilometer crater located in the Nereidum Montes, north of the Argyre ... [read more >>]
	05 February 2008, 09:06GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

New Partner to Join International Space Program
	Bad luck just seems to stay on NASA's tail. It now looks like the scheduled retirement of its space shuttle will leave the international community with a rather big dilemma. With the space shuttles gone, there would be no reusable vehicle capable of transporting astronauts to the International Space Station, since its own Orion spacecraft and the rocket used to launch it into space, the Ares I, currently in development, are ... [read more >>]
	04 February 2008, 04:55GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

NASA to Send Our Fellow Aliens a Copy of The Beatles' “Across the Universe” Song
	The radio transmission will be aimed towards the Polaris star, commonly known as the North Star, which is located 431 light years away from Earth, and will have the role to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the day when The Beatles recorded the song and, at the same time, five decades since NASA launched its first satellite into space, Explorer 1, and the foundation of the Deep Space Network, representing an international collaboration b ... [read more >>]
	02 February 2008, 04:58GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

NASA Commemorates Five Years from the Columbia Disaster
	Only four days ago, the world remembered the events which took place 22 years ago, when the space shuttle Challenger disintegrated into the Earth's atmosphere during a failed launch attempt. Through an unfortunate chain of events, five years ago, the space shuttle Columbia suffered a similar outcome during a re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere, leading to the death of another 7 crew members. The STS-107 mission, launched int ... [read more >>]
	01 February 2008, 08:57GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Remember Challenger
	Twenty two years ago, one of the most tragical aeronautical accidents in the history of mankind took place. After only 73 seconds into flight, the space shuttle Challenger suffered a catastrophic malfunction, leading to the disintegration of the vehicle and the death of its crew of seven. Challenger was originally scheduled for launch from the Kennedy Space Center on January 22, at 2:43 p.m. local time, but, due to difficulti ... [read more >>]
	28 January 2008, 05:01GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Columbus Back on Track
	No more delays, says NASA! The space shuttle Atlantis will liftoff on Thursday 7 February from the Kennedy Space Center at 20:24 CET, and will dock to the International Space Station two days later, on 9 February at 18:23 CET. Atlantis is scheduled to return back to Earth of February the 18th, somewhere around 15:57 CET. Once flown to the ISS, Europe will finally become an active partner in the operation of the only space sta ... [read more >>]
	28 January 2008, 03:33GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

See Mercury in Colors Now!
	How many of us have actually seen Mercury the way it really looks like? Most of the images available are black and white pictures. I don't really understand why this is, color photography wasn't invented yesterday, but I'm pretty sure there is a good reason for this. Last week, NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft made its first flyby around Mercury, during which time it has taken more than 1,200 pictures of the surface of the p ... [read more >>]
	23 January 2008, 10:10GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Mercury Shows Evidence of Past Lava Flow
	The MESSENGER spacecraft made a successful fly-by of the planet Mercury last week, taking more than 1,200 pictures of the surface, some of them showing what seems to be evidence of past lava flows. Planetary scientist David Rothery said that the lava flow actually sits on top of the original surface crust that formed as the planet cooled, and could have occurred only after the massive number of impacts which rendered multiple cra ... [read more >>]
	22 January 2008, 03:56GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Future Space Rocket Doomed!
	The next generation of rockets that are currently being designed by NASA, to launch vehicles into space during future manned lunar and Martian missions, are looking kind of shaky. Literally! They shake so violently in the launch process that the rocket will probably disintegrate long before getting into the Earth's orbit. Computer models of the launch of the Ares I rocket indicate that vibrations are caused by the engines a ... [read more >>]
	22 January 2008, 02:32GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Touch the Invisible Sky!
	NASA has succeeded in doing what nobody has tried before, by putting colored images of the skies at the fingertips of more than 10 million visually impaired people living on the territory of the United States. Some of the best images of the night sky ever taken have been made available for the blind into a 60-page book, by author Noreen Grice. Though they understand the nature of the universe and the world they live in as well as all of us ... [read more >>]
	21 January 2008, 07:33GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

NASA to Create a MMO Game?
	It's no secret that the virtual world is slowly taking over the real life (I should say "unfortunately" here, right?). And since the folks from NASA probably know that way better than everybody else, they are considering now to create a ... [read more >>]
	21 January 2008, 03:49GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

U.K. Proposes Space Station Extension
	The already busy schedule of building the International Space Station is about to get busier soon, due to British scientists and engineers proposal to launch two separate habitable modules by the year 2011. However, the ISS partnership between NASA, ESA and a few other countries has not approved the project so far, not to mention that the UK government has been delaying the collaboration with other space agencies for more than a ... [read more >>]
	18 January 2008, 05:24GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Four Decades Since Apollo 5
	Apollo 5 represented NASA's first unmanned flight that had the purpose of testing the Lunar Module meant for use in the mission to take the first man on the Moon's surface. Built by the Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation, the Lunar Module had the task of successfully landing two men on the surface of the Moon and returning them safely into the Moon's orbit, for the scheduled trip towards the Earth. The sp ... [read more >>]
	15 January 2008, 06:11GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

The All New Google Sky Is Here!
	The beginning of the New Year brought a new set of features and content for Sky in Google Earth. A magnificent sight, truly, and the value of it is even greater, because most of the new images, views and sounds have been developed by the Sky community. "Using NASA's space telescopes, you can view how the universe looks at many different wavelengths – from X-rays, ultraviolet and infrared light all the way through to ... [read more >>]
	10 January 2008, 06:53GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Russia Plans to Join Extraterrestrial Life Search Program
	We've looked and searched our extraterrestrial cousins throughout the whole solar system, and found no evidence that life may exist in our solar system, beyond the borders of our atmosphere. Only one body seems to present a final hope. One of Jupiter's many moons, Europa. The European Space Agency and NASA both have scheduled missions which involve sending probes to the surface of the icy moon, in order to look for evid ... [read more >>]
	08 January 2008, 06:58GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Progress Delivers Christmas Gifts to the ISS
	Since space shuttles cannot be flown into space whenever it is necessary, as we all saw during the Atlantis liftoff attempts early this month, which was scheduled to take the European module Columbus to the International Space Station, and due to the fact that NASA does not own a freight transport vehicle that could take that role, the Russian cargo ship, Progress 26, was sent to the ISS and successfully arrived on Wednesday, in order to ... [read more >>]
	27 December 2007, 07:07GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

NASA Names the New Lunar Lander
	More than three decades have passed since the last manned mission to the Moon and NASA hopes to change that within the next decade. Officials have revealed recently that they plan to send a manned mission to the moon by the year 2020. In order to do so however, they need a new lunar lander, previously referred to as the Lunar Surface Access Module. Nevertheless, NASA decided that they cannot use an exclusive name such as LSAM ... [read more >>]
	15 December 2007, 06:17GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Moon's Pictures Got Digitized
	Though being shot more than 40 years ago, during the 1960's when no more than five spacecrafts orbited the moon, these images have provided valuable data for the planing of the next manned mission to the moon. In the course of a year, spanning from August 1966 to August 1967, NASA's orbiter has taken an excess of 2,600 photographs of the moon, representing pictures of 99 percent of the total surface. Now these pictures ... [read more >>]
	04 December 2007, 06:58GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

NASA Tests Moon Base at the South Pole
	The Moon base has been specially designed for future moon explorers, and resembles a structure similar to an inflatable backyard bounce for children. It will head the South Pole, for a so-called Antarctic test run, to start early next year. The prototype has been demonstrated by NASA on Wednesday at ILC Dover's Frederica, Del., facility. The structure can be inflated, respectively deflated in about ten minutes, according ... [read more >>]
	19 November 2007, 06:32GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Google Still Got NASA’s Back
	NASA and Google forged a partnership two years ago and their common goal was to spawn a new era of innovation in Silicon Valley with supercomputing, biotechnology and nanotechnology, the study of extremely small devices. Despite the two big names involved, both examples of ingenuity and continuous evolving, nothing actually came out of the partnership. Well, not exactly nothing, Verne Kopytoff of The San Francisco Chronicle c ... [read more >>]
	15 November 2007, 06:22GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Spacewalks Are “No-Go” !
	As if NASA didn't have enough problems with an already tight schedule, now another incident brings up the problem of the spacesuits the astronauts wear while on spacewalk missions. During a test in a pressure-chamber on Earth, a trainee smelled traces of smoke inside his spacesuit. So far, the source of the smoke hasn't been found, but this event threats to delay the next month's mission, when the space shuttle Atlantis shou ... [read more >>]
	14 November 2007, 03:14GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

NASA Exposes Mankind to Total Annihilation
	Remember the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs and almost wiped all life from the face of the Earth? NASA says there is no immediate risk of that happening in the near future, although there might be a lot of such objects in the near vicinity of our planet that could intersect Earth's orbit and cause havoc, which could remain undetected. NASA is now exposing us to a possible planetary catastrophe if a big enough asteroid evades obse ... [read more >>]
	09 November 2007, 10:49GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Spirit Sprints Towards Sunnier Spots
	MER-A or Martian Exploration Rover–A also known as Spirit is the first of the two Martian Exploration Rovers sent by NASA on the Red Planet, it has reached Mars in January 2004 and has continued to function over thirteen times longer than the expectations of NASA's engineers. The second one, MER-B, known as Opportunity, has landed on the other side of the planet. Spirit has been exploring a plateau called Home Plate that ... [read more >>]
	08 November 2007, 02:42GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia