Home

On:

NASA’s Eagleworks laboratories has recently released the results of their latest, upgraded experiments designed to evaluate a controversial propulsion device, one that does not use physical propellant to produce thrust, as traditional rockets use. Their verdict: the EmDrive appears to work. As this drive would provide continuous acceleration, it would make space travel much faster. A trip to Mars, for example, could be cut from months to just a few weeks. The drives being tested now provide very little thrust, but much more powerful engines can be built.



The EmDrive, short for Electromagnetic Drive, was first proposed and built by British engineer Roger Shawyer in 2001.read more

On:

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has announced their plans for colonizing Mars, of which includes plans for permanent ‘Earth Independent’ settlements that would be capable of operating for extended missions with little or no material support needed from Earth.

Their report, entitled ‘Journey to Mars’, outlines NASA’s 3-stage plan for developing the path for the long-term colonization of Mars, with the goal of landing a human presence there sometime in the 2030s.
read more

On:

Linda Moulton Howe reports that the Principal Investigator for the Dawn space probe mission sent to the asteroid Ceres, Christopher Russell, Professor of Geophysics and Space Physics at UCLA cannot discuss the new high resolution images from Ceres because they have been embargoed by the science journal Nature. He may not discuss the images until after the journal publishes its article about them.
read more

On:

NASA has just announced the discovery of an earth-like planet orbiting a star similar to our sun, and within the star’s habitable zone. The planet has been designated Kepler-452b, and is the first such planet ever discovered. So far, nearly 4000 planets have been discovered in so-called ‘goldilocks zones’ around distant stars–regions where they are neither too hot nor too cold to sustain life. But all of these planets have been determined to be either very small, very large, or gas giants. Kepler-452b is a "bigger cousin of Earth." It has a 385 day orbit and is 5% farther from its star than Earth is from the sun. Its parent star is Kepler-452. It also has gravity twice that of Earth’s.
read more