See Mercury while you orbit with your Messenger

Written by: William Atkins | Published in: Space  The NASA probe MESSENGER has discovered that the planet Mercury, one of the hottest places in the solar system, contains a lot of ice; in fact enough to cover the policial capital of the United States 2.5 miles deep. What an great idea!

Usually the planet Mercury is difficult to see on Earth, but for the rest of March and into April 2010, it will be highlighted just below and to the right of the planet Venus in the northern latitudes.

The NASA GRAIL probe will be inserted into orbit about the Moon over the 2011 New Year’s weekend for its mission to precisely map the gravitational field of the Moon. NASA states that the twin satellites will improve our knowledge of the Moon by hundreds of times.

The U.S. space agency NASA announced Tuesday, May 24, 2011, that its next-generation space capsule, which will take astronauts beyond low-Earth orbit, will be based on the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle.

The U.S. space agency NASA announced on June 13, 2011, that it is ready to test its new upper stage rocket that will propel the United States past low-Earth orbit and toward the planets of our Solar System.

The design of the new NASA rocket that will take astronauts out beyond low-Earth orbit has been selected by the U.S. agency. It’s a whopper, eventually being the most powerful rocket ever built. NASA calls the entire program the Space Launch System.

Featured | Written by: Alex Zaharov-Reutt | Published in: Fuzzy LogicMicrosoft has a message for you, and in no way is it bottled up: Microsoft Messenger will send its last message on March 15, as Microsoft kills the venerable messaging program to replace it with its younger, newer and more popular stable mate: Skype.

A lot of space stuff is flying over your local sky at the end of May 2011 and the beginning of June 2011, like NASA’s Nanosail-D, the first solar sail to orbit Earth, and the space shuttle Endeavour, as it is docked to the International Space Station.

Astronomers have directly tracked the orbit of an extrasolar planet (exoplanet) for the first time. And, the star about which the exoplanet, Beta Pictoris b, is orbiting is the youngest star known to parent a planet.