Two weeks after an asteroid exploded over Russia's Ural mountains, scientists are making progress understanding the origin and make-up of the unexpected space rock.
This week's ScienceCast presents their latest results.
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On Feb. 15th an asteroid about half the size of a football field will fly past Earth closer than many man-made satellites.
Since regular sky surveys began in the 1990s, astronomers have never seen an object so big come so close to our planet.
This animation shows NASA's Orion spacecraft as it will appear on its Exploration Mission-1 in 2017, complete with a service module to be provided by the European Space Agency.
After Orion blasts off atop a Space Launch System rocket, the ESA-provided service module will fuel and propel the capsule on its journey through space. Exploration Mission-1 in 2017 will be the first mission to incorporate both the Orion vehicle and NASA's new Space Launch System. It will follow the upcoming Exploration Flight Test-1 in 2014, in which an uncrewed Orion will launch atop a Delta IV Heavy rocket and fly 3,600 miles above Earth's surface, farther than a human spacecraft has gone in 40 years.
Researchers studying thunderstorms have made a surprising discovery: The lightning we see with our eyes has a dark competitor that discharges storm clouds and flings antimatter into space. Astrophysicists and meteorologists are scrambling to understand "dark lightning."
NASA Television shares this inspiring production by Italian videomaker, Giacomo Sardelli, about the International Space Station, its inhabitants, and its role in space exploration.
Sardelli writes of the video, "I'm not the first one to use NASA's pictures taken from the International Space Station to craft a Timelapse video. You can find many of them on the Internet, that's where my inspiration came from. What I wanted to do, though, was to look beyond the intrinsic beauty of those pictures, and use them to tell a story and share the messages sent by the astronauts who worked on the station in the last 11 years."