Was SpaceX rocket hit by a drone? Shock claims Elon Musk’s Falcon 9 was 'attacked'

SpaceX rocket booster makes breakthrough landing at sea

Rocket Could Cut Mars Journey Time To Six Weeks

Sky.com - Russia has announced plans to test a nuclear engine that could help take its cosmonauts to Mars in six weeks.

Nasa's Curiosity Rover spots PYRAMID on Mars - is it proof of an ancient civilisation?

Mirror.co.uk - Nasa's Curiosity Rover has captured images of a perfectly formed pyramid on Mars and conspiracy theorists reckon it's proof of an alien civilization.

The pyramid is thought to be about the size of a car, and most people believe it's nothing more than a coincidental rock formation.

However, the YouTube channel ParanormalCrucible goes further, insisting the "near perfect design and shape" means the pyramid is: "the result of intelligent design and certainly not a trick of light and shadow".

Other outlandish theories suggest the pyramid is simply the tip of a larger structure buried underground.

Some viewers pointed out that the mysterious pyramid could have been formed by wind.

This isn't the first time that conspiracy fans have seized on images from Mars as evidence that not all is what it seems.

Earlier this year pictures emerged reportedly showing a mushroom cloud and the shadow of a workman on the Red Planet.

Audi is helping to make a moon rover for Google's Lunar Xprize

Name a Martian crater for just $5 bucks

Foxnews.com - Naming landmarks on Mars isn't just for scientists and rover drivers anymore.

Starting Wednesday, anybody with an Internet connection and a few dollars to spare can give a moniker to one of the Red Planet's 500,000 or so unnamed craters, as part of a mapping project run by the space-funding company Uwingu.

"This is the first people's map of Mars, where anybody can play," said Uwingu CEO Alan Stern, a former NASA science chief who also heads the space agency's New Horizons mission to Pluto. "It's a very social thing."

Putting your stamp on Mars isn't free. Naming the smallest craters will set you back $5, with prices going up as crater size increases. Uwingu will use the money raised by the project — which could be more than $10 million, if people name every available Martian crater — to fund grants in space exploration, research and education, which is the company's stated chief purpose.

"We're developing this grant fund — the Uwingu fund — for people who've been hit by sequestration," Stern told Space.com. "There's nothing like it right now. They have no place to go; it's either NASA, NSF [the National Science Foundation] or you're out of luck."

Stern hopes the effort will succeed in naming all of Mars' cataloged craters by the end of 2014, helping to fill in a lot of gaps in Red Planet cartography. (The company aims to solicit names for other Red Planet features, such as canyons and mountains, in the future.)

The project could also provide a sort of cultural snapshot, revealing what people are thinking about and what's important to them at this moment, he added.

"It's like taking a picture of ourselves," Stern said. "What will people put? Will there be a lot of craters named for politicians? For artists, for relatives, for places on Earth? Sports teams?"

The crater-naming project is not a contest, working instead on a first-come, first-served basis. Names will be accepted immediately and will remain approved unless Uwingu officials later determine them to be profane or otherwise offensive.

Stern stressed that Uwingu (whose name means "sky" in Swahili) is not trying to supplant other Mars maps, such as the one generated by the United States Geological Survey. The 15,000 Red Planet features whose names have already been approved by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) will be grandfathered into Uwingu's base map, officials said.

The Uwingu project also will not seek approval from the IAU, which has traditionally authorized "official" names for celestial bodies and their features. Rather, the crater monikers will be informal or popular names, Stern said. (Unofficial names can still come into wide usage: "The Milky Way," for example, is not IAU-sanctioned.)

This is not Uwingu's first foray into celestial-object naming. The company has also raised funds by asking the public to choose monikers for the thousands of exoplanets and exoplanet candidates being discovered around the galaxy, including Alpha Centauri Bb, the closest alien world to Earth.

IAU officials expressed disapproval of these previous projects, asserting last year that the exoplanet-naming efforts misled people into thinking they were helping select officially recognized names. But Stern fought back hard against this claim at the time, saying that Uwingu has always made clear that the projects sought only to choose "people's choice" monikers.

To learn more about the Mars map project, and to buy a crater name of your own, click here.

Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo Space Plane Goes Supersonic In Third Test Flight

Watch the SpaceX Grasshopper Hop Into the Air and Fly Sideways

'Warp drive' may be more feasible than thought, scientists say

Foxnews.com - A warp drive to achieve faster-than-light travel — a concept popularized in television's Star Trek — may not be as unrealistic as once thought, scientists say.

A warp drive would manipulate space-time itself to move a starship, taking advantage of a loophole in the laws of physics that prevent anything from moving faster than light. A concept for a real-life warp drive was suggested in 1994 by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre, however subsequent calculations found that such a device would require prohibitive amounts of energy.

Now physicists say that adjustments can be made to the proposed warp drive that would enable it to run on significantly less energy, potentially brining the idea back from the realm of science fiction into science.

"There is hope," Harold "Sonny" White of NASA's Johnson Space Center said here Friday (Sept. 14) at the 100 Year Starship Symposium, a meeting to discuss the challenges of interstellar spaceflight.

Warping space-time

An Alcubierre warp drive would involve a football-shape spacecraft attached to a large ring encircling it. This ring, potentially made of exotic matter, would cause space-time to warp around the starship, creating a region of contracted space in front of it and expanded space behind.

Meanwhile, the starship itself would stay inside a bubble of flat space-time that wasn't being warped at all.

"Everything within space is restricted by the speed of light," explained Richard Obousy, president of Icarus Interstellar, a non-profit group of scientists and engineers devoted to pursuing interstellar spaceflight. "But the really cool thing is space-time, the fabric of space, is not limited by the speed of light."

With this concept, the spacecraft would be able to achieve an effective speed of about 10 times the speed of light, all without breaking the cosmic speed limit.

The only problem is, previous studies estimated the warp drive would require a minimum amount of energy about equal to the mass-energy of the planet Jupiter.

But recently White calculated what would happen if the shape of the ring encircling the spacecraft was adjusted into more of a rounded donut, as opposed to a flat ring. He found in that case, the warp drive could be powered by a mass about the size of a spacecraft like the Voyager 1 probe NASA launched in 1977.

Furthermore, if the intensity of the space warps can be oscillated over time, the energy required is reduced even more, White found.

"The findings I presented today change it from impractical to plausible and worth further investigation," White told SPACE.com. "The additional energy reduction realized by oscillating the bubble intensity is an interesting conjecture that we will enjoy looking at in the lab."

Laboratory tests

White and his colleagues have begun experimenting with a mini version of the warp drive in their laboratory.

They set up what they call the White-Juday Warp Field Interferometer at the Johnson Space Center, essentially creating a laser interferometer that instigates micro versions of space-time warps.

"We're trying to see if we can generate a very tiny instance of this in a tabletop experiment, to try to perturb space-time by one part in 10 million," White said.

He called the project a "humble experiment" compared to what would be needed for a real warp drive, but said it represents a promising first step.

And other scientists stressed that even outlandish-sounding ideas, such as the warp drive, need to be considered if humanity is serious about traveling to other stars.

"If we're ever going to become a true spacefaring civilization, we're going to have to think outside the box a little bit, were going to have to be a little bit audacious," Obousy said.

A Cannon for Shooting Supplies into Space

If John Hunter—a former physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory—is successful, the International Space Station may start receiving their supplies from a cannon. No, it's no joke.

First postulated by Jules Verne in his novel From the Earth to the Moon, the idea of space cannons is not new. Many engineers have toyed with the concept, but nobody has came up with an actual project that may work. Hunter's idea is simple: Build a cannon near the equator, submerged in the ocean, hooked to a floating rig. At the cannon's bottom there is a combustion chamber, which uses natural gas to heat hydrogen up to 2,600ºF, increasing the pressure 500%. When released, the gas will launch a capsule with half a ton of material into space, at a swooshing 13,000mph.

The project itself would only cost $500 million, which is a really stupid amount considering the potential benefits: A system like this will cut launch costs from $5,000 per pound to only $250 per pound. It won't launch people into space because of the excessive acceleration, but those guys at the ISS can use it to order pizza and real ice cream.

Japan to Spend $21,000,000,000 on a Power Plant in Space

Holy cow, Japan is getting prepped to drop $21 billion on a solar power station in space, one that will beam enough energy back to Earth to power 294,000 homes. With no cables.

The whole deal is being put together by Mitsubishi Electric Corp. and industrial design company IGI Corp. The plan involves a gigantic solar panel floating around in space, soaking up a gigawatt of energy and beaming it to Earth without the use of cables. And they hope to have it ready to rock within four years.

Pretty amazing stuff. Here's hoping it works well and doesn't end up giving the entire country of Japan cancer. Thanks for testing that whole thing out for us, guys!

1918 Artwork Imagines Space Travel at a Blistering Two Miles Per Minute

You can't fault a 1918 artist for thinking future spacemen would travel the stars at two miles/minute (120 mph). But to think that astronauts would travel open canopy, Wright Brothers style? Cah-rayzee talk.

There's also the matter of the major planets all somehow appearing in the night sky alongside the Moon, but whatever. The pics are cool, in a steam punky, biplanes-in-space kind of way, and all those people on the open air observation decks sure have a great view!

Did China Fake Its Spacewalk?

'Cosmic Eye' Photographed Staring Across Space

A spectacular "cosmic eye" has been photographed in space by a telescope in Chile, showing a distant nebula in which sunlike stars are burning themselves out.

The image of the Helix nebula, which lies 700 light years away in the constellation Aquarius, was captured with the Wide Field Imager instrument at the La Silla Observatory high above the Atacama Desert.

The Helix is a planetary nebula — a kind of stellar old people's home, in which stars at the end of their lives shed clouds of gas, often creating intricate patterns that shine with great beauty.

The Helix nebula is one of the closest planetary nebulae to Earth, but it is hard to see visually because its light is spread thinly over a large area of sky, a quarter of the size of the full Moon.

The main ring of the Helix nebula is about two light-years across, or half the distance between the Sun and the nearest star.

Around the inside of the ring, it is possible to see small blobs that resemble droplets of water, known as "cometary knots," which have faint tails that extend away from the central star.