| April 22, 2009 | - A supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy billions of light-years away was found to be spewing water vapor.
| Source:
BBC
|
| March 4, 2009 | - A 40-yard-wide asteroid just missed striking the earth.
| Source:
CNN
|
| January 3, 2009 | -
NASA's robot rovers Spirit and Opportunity survived their fifth year on Mars. Despite dust clouds coating and clogging their solar panels, they climbed a mountain, descended a crater, and traversed long distances of treacherous, ancient terrain.
| Source:
CNN
|
| November 14, 2008 | - Astronomers in Canada and the United States, observing the constellations Piscis Austrinus and Pegasus, captured the first images of distant, dusty planets orbiting young, bright stars.
| Source:
NYT
|
| November 14, 2008 | - India's space program landed a probe painted with the national flag on the surface of the moon.
| Source:
BBC
|
| September 30, 2008 | -
NASA discovered that snow falls on Mars.
| Source:
Washington Post
|
| September 26, 2008 | -
Chinese
astronauts conducted the country's first-ever spacewalk. “After the Olympics, it's the most exciting thing that enhances our national pride and dignity this year,” said He Haihong, a Beijing sales manager.
| Source:
Boston Globe
|
| September 1, 2008 | - For the first time in a century, a month passed without a visible spot on the sun. An ice age, said scientists, may be forthcoming.
| Source:
Daily Tech
|
| August 27, 2008 | -
NASA confirmed that laptops in space had been infected with the virus Gammima.AG.
| Source:
BBC
|
| August 21, 2008 | - Astronomers suggested that black holes might come in only small and large sizes, not medium.
| Source:
Science Daily
|
| July 26, 2008 | - The planet CoRot-Exo-4b, a ringed gas giant resembling Jupiter and larger than the sun, was discovered 3,000 light-years away, in the Unicorn constellation.
| Source:
Fresh News
|
| July 25, 2008 | -
NASA announced that the lights of the auroras australis and borealis are caused by magnetic explosions one-third of the way to the moon.
| Source:
Science Daily
|
| July 4, 2008 | -
Mercury was shrinking.
| Source:
BBCnews.com
|
| July 1, 2008 | -
Earth, said scientists who study radio waves, is shrieking.
| Source:
Yahoo News
|
| May 25, 2008 | - The Phoenix spacecraft landed on Mars, where it will search for life.
| Source:
The Washington Post
|
| April 14, 2008 | -
Russia was considering sending monkeys to Mars.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| April 14, 2008 | - John Wheeler, a physicist who coined the term “black hole,” died at age 96. In his 1999 autobiography he explained what can be learned by studying black holes: “That space can be crumpled like a piece of paper,” he wrote, “into an infinitesimal dot.”
| Source:
New York Times
|
| April 10, 2008 | -
French and Canadian
astronomers announced the discovery of the coldest brown-dwarf star on record, 40 light-years away.
| Source 1:
AP via Google News
Source 2:
|
| March 21, 2008 | - Researchers discovered a hidden ocean underneath the crust of Titan, Saturn's largest moon.
| Source:
Scientific American
|
| March 20, 2008 | - A NASA probe revealed that Mars may be covered in table salt.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| February 22, 2008 | -
Scientists revealed that the sun will vaporize the earth if we cannot figure out how to change our orbit within 7.6 billion years.
| Source:
Scientific Blogging
|
| February 6, 2008 | -
NASA celebrated its 50th anniversary by beaming the Beatles hit “Across the Universe” into deep space, directing the song toward Polaris, 431 light-years away. Scientists meeting at Arizona State University were concerned that the broadcast could provoke an attack by mean-spirited aliens. “Before sending out even symbolic messages,” said a researcher, “we need an open discussion about the potential risks.”
| Source 1:
Washington Post
Source 2:
Telegraph
|
| January 30, 2008 | - New pictures of Mercury revealed the elderly planet's spider-shaped birthmark, shrinkage, wrinkles, and scars.
| Source:
Mercury Is Shrinking, Volcanic
|
| November 21, 2007 | - Citing Schrodinger's cat, cosmologists speculated that humans' observation of dark matter, beginning in 1998, might bring about the premature destruction of the universe.
| Source:
Telegraph
|
| August 24, 2007 | -
Scientists found a very big hole in the universe.
| Source:
Yahoo News
|
| August 15, 2007 | - Astronomers observed a dying star named Mira shedding a dazzling, comet-like tail.
| Source:
BBC
|
| August 12, 2007 | - Teacher Barbara Morgan, Christa McAuliffe's backup on the ill-fated 1986 Challenger mission, blasted into orbit on board the space shuttle
Endeavour, which suffered damage to its heat shield.
| Source:
Kansas City Star
|
| August 6, 2007 | - Five billion light years from earth, four galaxies violently converged; astronomers predicted that over the next 100 million years they will fuse into a single galaxy ten times larger than the Milky Way. A celestial plume of billions of expelled stars bloomed from the collision. Half of these stars will resettle in the new giant galaxy; the rest are lost in space.
| Source:
BBC
|
| July 27, 2007 | - A panel found that NASA had allowed astronauts to fly drunk.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| July 24, 2007 | - Fast-growing supermassive black holes fed like piranhas on cosmic gases.
| Source:
Space.com via Yahoo! News
|
| July 23, 2007 | - A crew member at the International Space Station tossed half a ton of garbage into orbit. “Jettison!” cried the astronaut. “Our spaceship earth is a beautiful place.”
| Source:
AP via Yahoo! News
|
| June 11, 2007 | - After a two-day chase, astronauts aboard the space ship Atlantis finally caught up with the orbiting international space station, where they floated into the station's Destiny laboratory and gave each resident a hug.
| Source:
Washington Post
|
| May 30, 2007 | -
China and India were preparing to race to the moon.
| Source:
Financial Times
|
| May 23, 2007 | - n the midst of a bright, dusty lava-plain on Mars, astronomers discovered an immensely deep cavern from which no light escapes.
| Source:
HiRISE Operations Center
|
| May 18, 2007 | - New stars were hatching near the head of Orion.
| Source:
Science Daily
|
| May 15, 2007 | - Observing the bent light from cluster CL0024+17, astronomers inferred that a ring of dark matter 5 billion light years away had been formed by colliding galaxy clusters.
| Source:
Physorg.com
|
| May 11, 2007 | -
NASA unveiled a new telescope that will help scientists “see the very birth of the universe.”
| Source:
BBC
|
| May 8, 2007 | - Astronomers continued to observe the death of a star 150 times more massive than the sun. “Of all exploding stars ever observed,” said one astronomer, “this was the king.”
| Source:
BBC
|
| April 3, 2007 | - The estate of deceased actor James Doohan, who was best known for his performance as the space mechanic “Scotty” on Star Trek, paid $495 to have his ashes rocketed into orbit.
| Source:
Playfuls.com
|
| March 28, 2007 | - A 15,000-mile-wide hexagon was seen on Saturn.
| Source:
Daily Mail
|
| February 15, 2007 | - Evidence from new photographs of Mars suggested subterranean streams capable of hosting simple forms of life.
| Source:
Bloomberg.com
|
| January 9, 2007 | - An astronomer speculated that the last space probe to Mars failed to find life on the planet because it was looking for the wrong kind of life.
| Source:
CNN
|
| January 4, 2007 | - Local police claimed ownership of a rare meteorite that crashed through the roof of a New Jersey family's house.
| Source:
|
| January 1, 2007 | - United Airlines employees claimed to have seen a saucer-like object hovering over O'Hare Airport last fall.
| Source:
AP via Yahoo! News
|
| December 7, 2006 | -
Scientists suspected that water was flowing on Mars.
| Source:
Washington Post
|
| December 7, 2006 | - Astronomers watched a giant black hole eat an entire star.
| Source:
Washington Post
|
| December 5, 2006 | -
NASA announced that by 2024 it would open a space camp for astronauts at the south pole of the moon.
| Source:
Washington Post
|
| December 4, 2006 | -
NASA head Michael Griffin compared space
explorers to Vikings. “Fifty years into it,” he explained, “the amount of progress that the Vikings had made would not have been that noticeable, and that's where we are in space flight today.”
| Source:
Washington Post
|
| November 28, 2006 | -
Scientists said that a “primordial meteorite” may hold clues about the “raw organic molecules needed for life,” that humpback whales may be every bit as intelligent as humans, dolphins, and great apes, and that women speak three times as much as men.
| Source 1:
BBC
Source 2:
The Age
Source 3:
Daily Mail
|
| November 25, 2006 | - In London, Col. Alexander Litvinenko, an ex-KGB agent, died several weeks after being poisoned with polonium 210, a rare isotope that is used in nuclear bombs and moon buggies. Investigators fear that Litvinenko, who accused Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin of ordering his assassination, may have spread radiation to his wife and son as they hugged and kissed him on his deathbed.
| Source 1:
Sky News
Source 2:
Sun (U.K.)
Source 3:
Daily Mail
|
| November 11, 2006 | - There was a hurricane on Saturn.
| Source:
ABC News Online
|
| November 8, 2006 | -
The moon appeared to be leaking gas.
| Source:
PhysOrg
|
| October 3, 2006 | - John Mather and George Smoot won the Nobel Prize in physics for their research into cosmic microwave background radiation.
| Source:
Bloomberg.com
|
| September 18, 2006 | - Anousheh Ansari, a communications entrepreneur from Texas, became the world's first female Muslim
space tourist.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| September 18, 2006 | - There was a chemical spill on the International Space Station.
| Source:
The New York Times
|
| September 14, 2006 | - The dwarf
planet Xena was renamed Eris, for the Greek goddess of discord, and the planet's moon was named Dysnomia, for the spirit of lawlessness.
| Source:
The New York Times
|
| September 14, 2006 | -
Astronomers announced a new fluffy planet called HAT-P-1 that is very far away.
| Source:
AP via Yahoo! News
|
| September 7, 2006 | - Actor William Shatner turned down a free seat on the Virgin Galactic spaceship. “To vomit in space,” he said, “is not my idea of a good time.”
| Source:
The Daily Mail
|
| August 23, 2006 | - Paul Weisman, a researcher at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said that scientists were “anally pursuing” a new designation for Pluto.
| Source:
Universe 'too fascinating'
|
| August 16, 2006 | -
Pluto retained its status as a planet.
| Source:
The New York Times
|
| August 14, 2006 | -
Astronomers were trying to decide whether Pluto was or was not a planet. “So far,” said an astronomer, “it looks like a stalemate.”
| Source:
CNN.com
|
| August 14, 2006 | - It was reported that NASA had lost the original high-resolution tapes of the July 1969 moon landing.
| Source 1:
AOL Log Search
Source 2:
The Independent
|
| August 2, 2006 | -
Japanese physicists were preparing to create a “baby universe,” with its own laws of physics, by cutting off a piece of our own.
| Source:
Sentido.tv
|
| July 24, 2006 | -
Chinese scientists were preparing to test an artificial sun.
| Source:
UPI
|
| July 21, 2006 | -
Research revealed that giant thermonuclear explosions detected in the constellation Ophiuchus were caused by a Red Giant star dumping gas onto a White Dwarf star.
| Source:
CNN.com
|
| July 5, 2006 | - Astronomers observed what they said might be a strange glowing blob of dark matter sucking in gas.
| Source:
New Scientist
|
| June 20, 2006 | -
Scientists announced that the Earth is surrounded by giant fizzy space bubbles; the bubbles swell to nearly 620 miles in diameter, explode, and are replaced by a cooling solar wind.
| Source:
CNN
|
| June 3, 2006 | -
gGeologists identified the impact site of a giant meteor that is suspected of having wiped out most life on earth a quarter-billion years ago.
| Source:
BBC
|
| May 28, 2006 | -
NASA scientists claimed that they could extract oxygen from lunar soil.
| Source:
The Daily Mail
|
| April 2, 2006 | - Scientists successfully sent muon neutrinos from Illinois to Minnesota in order to prove that some neutrinos do transform, most likely to tau neutrinos.
| Source:
Chicago Sun-Times
|
| April 1, 2006 | - Astronaut Marco Pontes became the first Brazilian in space.
| Source:
CNN.com
|
| March 29, 2006 | - There was a total eclipse of the sun.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| March 11, 2006 | - The Cassini spacecraft, said NASA, found what appeared to be water on Saturn's moon Enceladus.
| Source:
The Washington Post
|
| March 5, 2006 | - A physicist at Mahatma Gandhi University in Kottayam, India, speculated that the "red rain" that fell in the Kerala district of western India in 2001 was filled with extraterrestrial, bacteria-like material from a passing comet.
| Source:
The Guardian
|
| January 17, 2006 | -
Astronomers in West Virginia discovered a superbubble.
| Source:
SFGate.com
|
| January 8, 2006 | - The FAA took steps to lower the risk of space
terrorism.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| December 23, 2005 | - New rings were found around Uranus.
| Source:
CNN.com
|
| November 24, 2005 | - Former Canadian Minister of Defense Paul Hellyer called on Canadian Parliament to hold hearings on the best way to deal with extraterrestrials. “I'm so concerned about what the consequences might be of starting an intergalactic war,” said Hellyer, “that I just think I had to say something.”
| Source:
PRWeb
|
| November 3, 2005 | -
Scientists confirmed that Sagittarius A, the object at the center of our galaxy, is indeed a black hole.
| Source:
CNN.com
|
| October 24, 2005 | -
William Shatner
passed a kidney stone.
| Source:
14WFIE
|
| October 21, 2005 | - A panel of researchers called on NASA to think through issues of astronaut sexuality as it plans a trip to Mars. "If there are instances of sexual conflict or infidelity," said a medical anthropologist, "that may lead to a breakdown in crew functioning."
| Source:
New Scientist Space
|
| September 24, 2005 | -
China was preparing to send the manned Shenzhou VI spacecraft into orbit.
| Source:
Red Nova
|
| September 19, 2005 | -
NASA announced that it wanted to return to the moon.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| August 9, 2005 | - The Space Shuttle Discovery landed safely in California.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| July 29, 2005 | - A huge patch of ice was discovered on Mars.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| July 29, 2005 | - An object possibly larger than Pluto was discovered beyond the orbit of Neptune. “Someone should have found this before,” said an astronomer.
| Source:
New Scientist
|
| July 28, 2005 | - As the culmination of its $1.4 billion “Return to Flight” effort, NASA launched the Space Shuttle Discovery into orbit. Almost immediately, the shuttle shed pieces of insulation and hit a bird. President George W. Bush watched the launch on a small television and clapped his hands, and NASA grounded all future shuttle flights.
| Source 1:
Newsday
Source 2:
Boston.com
Source 3:
The Washington Post
Source 4:
The Washington Post
|
| July 3, 2005 | -
NASA smashed a coffee-table-sized device traveling at 23,000 miles per hour into the Tempel 1 comet.
| Source:
Nasa.gov
|
| May 24, 2005 | -
NASA planned to put a laser in orbit around the moon.
| Source:
Red Nova
|
| May 24, 2005 | - The space probe Voyager 1 entered the heliosheath, 8.7 billion miles from the sun.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| May 4, 2005 | - Twelve new moons were discovered orbiting Saturn.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| March 22, 2005 | - Two planets, HD 209458b and TrES-1, were discovered near different stars.
| Source:
New Scientist
|
| March 10, 2005 | - “We are all waiting for death,” said an Iraqi soldier, “like the moon waiting for sunset.”
| Source:
Washington Post
|
| March 10, 2005 | - A new service, Talktoaliens.com, allowed people to send messages directly into space via telephone for $3.99 a minute.
| Source:
New Scientist
|
| March 9, 2005 | -
NASA considered ending the mission of Voyager 1, which is thirteen light-hours from the sun.
| Source:
Space Daily
|
| February 16, 2005 | -
NASA researchers studying the methane signatures of Mars found evidence of life below the Martian surface.
| Source:
Space.com
|
| February 8, 2005 | -
NASA decided to scrap the Hubble space telescope.
| Source:
New Scientist
|
| January 22, 2005 | -
Scientists learned that it sometimes rains liquid methane on Saturn's moon Titan, and a probe penetrating the moon's thin crust revealed that the chemicals, pebbles, and ice within it is akin to creme brulee in texture. The researchers speculated that after life becomes impossible on Earth, temperatures will rise on Titan and its ice will melt, releasing oxygen that might support life.
| Source:
The Guardian
|
| December 29, 2004 | - Astronauts aboard the international space station reported they'd had little to eat except candy for the last five weeks,
| Source:
Reuters
|
| December 23, 2004 | -
NASA announced that a 400-meter asteroid had a good chance of striking the earth in 2029.
| Source:
NASA
|
| December 15, 2004 | - A virtual island on the planet Calypso sold for $26,500,
| Source:
The New Scientist
|
| November 11, 2004 | - Astronomers took a closer look at Uranus, and found it stormy, with “vigorous convective activity in the southern hemisphere”; they described the rings around Uranus as “a layer of chunks.”
| Source:
New Scientist
|
| October 3, 2004 | - The oxygen generator failed on the international space station.
| Source:
CBS
|
| September 21, 2004 | - The discovery that methane and water vapor are concentrated together on Mars suggested that methane-producing bacteria may be present on the planet.
| Source:
New Scientist
|
| September 9, 2004 | - The Genesis space capsule, which had been collecting sun beams in outer space, crashed into the Utah desert after two helicopters failed to catch it in mid-air as planned.
| Source:
New Scientist
|
| September 4, 2004 | - The Cassini spacecraft discovered a new ring around Saturn.
| Source:
2004-09-09
|
| July 4, 2004 | - The Cassini spacecraft orbited Saturn and transmitted the first pictures of the icy rings circling the planet, and
| Source:
New York Times
|
| July 2, 2004 | - the Hubble Space Telescope discovered a hundred new planets orbiting stars in the Milky Way.
| Source:
BBC
|
| June 21, 2004 | - The first privately funded astronaut made it into space.
| Source:
New Scientist
|
| June 14, 2004 | - New photographs of Saturn's moon Phoebe, which were taken by the Cassini space probe, suggested that the moon might be a captured comet.
| Source:
New Scientist
|
| June 12, 2004 | - An astronomer in Virginia reconstructed the sound of the Big Bang and discovered that it sounded at first like a "majestic" major third chord and then changed to a "sadder" minor third.
| Source:
New Scientist
|
| May 24, 2004 | - Astronomers were looking for shadows of the Big Bang.
| Source:
New Scientist
|
| May 18, 2004 | - NASA astrophysicists said that measurements of X rays from 26 galaxy clusters confirmed that dark energy, a kind of mysterious repulsive gravity, dominates the universe.
| Source:
New Scientist
|
| May 13, 2004 | - Scientists reported that the amount of sunshine that reaches the surface of the earth has dropped significantly in recent decades.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| May 13, 2004 | - A company called Orbital Recovery announced that it will launch a space-going tugboat in 2007.
| Source:
New Scientist
|
| April 15, 2004 | - Scientists using a new technique called microlensing found a planet in the constellation Sagittarius.
| Source:
New Scientist
|
| March 25, 2004 | -
Astrophysicists suggested that a highway of dark matter ripped from the dwarf galaxy Sagittarius, which is being consumed by the Milky Way, is streaming right through Earth.
| Source:
Science Daily
|
| March 3, 2004 | -
NASA scientists announced that Mars was once wet enough to support life.
| Source:
Associated Press
|
| March 1, 2004 | - Astronomers at the Chandra X-ray Observatory found evidence of a new class of black holes.
| Source:
NASA
|
| February 18, 2004 | - A black hole was observed eating a star.
| Source:
Space.com
|
| February 17, 2004 | - Astronomers found a crystal the size of our moon in the heart of a dying white dwarf.
| Source:
New Scientist
|
| January 26, 2004 | - A second American Mars rover, called Opportunity, landed on the planet.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| January 24, 2004 | - New research suggested that astronauts sent to Mars might be paralyzed by the prolonged lack of gravity.
| Source:
Globe and Mail
|
| January 23, 2004 | - The European Mars Express mission made the first direct measurement of ice on Mars.
| Source:
New Scientist
|
| January 14, 2004 | -
President Bush ordered NASA to build a permanent base on the moon and and to make preparations to send men to Mars; NASA responded by abandoning future maintenance missions for the Hubble Space Telescope, thereby condemning the telescope to a premature death.
| Source:
Space.com
|
| January 11, 2004 | -
Lockheed Martin and Boeing were said to be enthusiastic about the President's
Mars
plan.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| January 9, 2004 | -
President Bush was preparing to announce plans to colonize the Moon and to send astronauts to Mars, officials said, but they were vague about how he intends to pay for the scheme.
| Source:
BBC
|
| January 6, 2004 | - The International Space Station seemed to have sprung a leak.
| Source:
Associated Press
|
| January 4, 2004 | - NASA's Spirit rover landed on Mars and began sending photographs back to Earth.
| Source:
Associated Press
|
| January 3, 2004 | - The American spacecraft Stardust got very close to the Wild 2 comet and managed to photograph its nucleus and to capture some of its dust.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| December 25, 2003 | -
Britain's Beagle 2 spacecraft apparently landed on Mars, though it failed to transmit its nine-note homing signal, which was composed by a pop band called Blur.
| Source:
Daily Telegraph
|
| December 6, 2003 | -
President Bush was thinking about sending a man to the moon.
| Source:
Guardian
|
| December 3, 2003 | - Physicists speculated that tiny exploding black holes are raining down on the earth.
| Source:
New Scientist
|
| November 27, 2003 | - Astronauts on board the international space station reported hearing a weird noise.
| Source:
Associated Press
|
| November 7, 2003 | - The Voyager I spacecraft was approaching the "termination shock," a turbulent region near the edge of the solar system.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| November 1, 2003 | - Astronomers speculated that Sagittarius A, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, is spinning.
| Source:
New Scientist
|
| October 26, 2003 | - A large geomagnetic storm caused by explosions on the surface of the sun (called coronal mass ejections) hit the earth but caused few disruptions.
| Source:
BBC
|
| October 16, 2003 | - A Chinese astronaut orbited the earth but failed to spot the Great Wall from space.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| September 28, 2003 | - A meteorite injured five Indians near the Bay of Bengal.
| Source:
Agence France-Presse
|
| September 28, 2003 | - Europe sent a probe to the moon.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| September 23, 2003 | - All nine members of NASA's safety advisory panel resigned.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| August 28, 2003 | - The Columbia Accident Investigation Board issued its report and largely blamed NASA's leadership and its "broken safety culture" for the space shuttle disaster.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| August 5, 2003 | -
Astronomers said that a ten-year galactic dust storm will soon envelope the Earth.
| Source:
New Scientist
|
| January 21, 2003 | -
The European Space Agency cancelled plans to land a spaceship on a comet, and a British man beheaded himself with a homemade guillotine.
| |
| December 11, 2001 | - New data suggested that Mars was undergoing global warming.
| |
| November 27, 2001 | -
China was planning to put a man on the moon.
| |
| August 28, 2001 | - Astronauts removed two tons of trash from the international space station.
| |
| August 14, 2001 | -
NASA was planning to commission the boy-band Natural to compose a pop song to improve the agency's image among young people and to encourage an interest in space exploration. “If we have to do it by being hip,” said a NASA space nerd, “so be it.”
| |
| August 7, 2001 | - Some British and Indian
scientists claimed that they had positively identified alien bacteria entering Earth's upper atmosphere from space, which would tend, they said, to confirm the Panspermia theory of life's origin.
| |
| August 7, 2001 | -
Nigeria announced a new $100 million space program.
| |
| August 7, 2001 | - The general in charge of the United States Air Force said that he favored “weaponizing” space.
| |
| July 17, 2001 | -
Russian officials said that the reappearance of crop circles in a wheat field near Maikop, Krasnodar, was evidence of space aliens taking soil samples from the Earth.
| |
| July 17, 2001 | - Astronomers discovered 12 more moons around Saturn.
| |
| July 10, 2001 | - Fifteen illegal aliens were discovered at the Kennedy Space Center.
| |
| July 3, 2001 | -
NASA
launched an observatory to study the afterglow of the Big Bang.
| |
| June 19, 2001 | - A group of NASA engineers and American astronomers proposed solving the problem of global warming by moving the entire Earth into another orbit, which they say would add another 6 billion years to the planet's working life. “The technology is not at all far-fetched,” Dr. Greg Laughlin said. “We don't need raw power to move Earth, we just require delicacy of planning and maneuvering.”
| |
| May 1, 2001 | - Dennis Tito, a very rich man, finally managed to buy himself a visit to space.
| |
| April 10, 2001 | -
NASA said it would have to cut costs on the International Space Station because it faced a budget shortfall; the agency also launched the Mars Odyssey, which will reach Mars in October if all goes according to plan, though the ship's name bodes ill.
| |
| April 10, 2001 | - Astronomers discovered 11 new planets, one of which was in a “habitable zone” where temperatures conducive to life might be possible.
| |
| April 10, 2001 | -
Scientists found evidence of negative gravity, also known as dark energy and the “cosmological constant,” in a photograph of an exploding star.
| |
| April 3, 2001 | - Dr. Jack Ng, a physicist, claimed that he would be able to measure “quantum foam,” graininess or ripples in the fabric of space, with a Laser Interferometer Gravitational Observatory.
| |
| March 27, 2001 | -
Russia's space station Mir fell from the sky.
| |
| March 6, 2001 | - A team of scientists working on a Martian meteorite known as ALH 84002 said that they had discovered “conclusive evidence” of bacterial life on Mars 3.9 billion years ago, which would be the oldest evidence of life yet discovered.
| |
| March 6, 2001 | - Other scientists were skeptical and appealed to the possibility of terrestrial contamination of the meteorite, which was on Earth for 13,000 years before it was found in 1984.
| |
| February 27, 2001 | - A team of Japanese
researchers think that Earth will be as dry as Mars in about a billion years, because 1.12 billion tons of water leaks down into the earth's mantle each year.
| |
| February 20, 2001 | -
NASA landed a spaceship on an asteroid.
| |
| January 16, 2001 | -
Israel's chief rabbis declared that Jewish law prohibits giving up sovereignty over the Temple Mount; the Islamic mufti of Jerusalem said much the same thing: non-Muslims, he said, are forbidden to control even “its depths, no matter how far down, and the space above it, now matter how high up.”
| |
| December 12, 2000 | - There was new evidence that Mars once had water.
| |
| November 21, 2000 | -
Russia decided to go ahead and crash the space station Mir into the Pacific ocean, disappointing Dennis Tito, an American businessman who had hoped to pay $20 million to visit the doomed station, and television executives, who were planning to film a “reality-based” television program there.
| |
| October 24, 2000 | -
Russian
space experts said that it was time to bring down the Mir space station before it crashed into a populated area; a spokesman for MirCorp, an Amsterdam company that plans to send tourists and game-show contestants to the station, said that Mir was just fine.
| |
| October 17, 2000 | - It was announced that a meteorite that landed in a frozen lake in Canada last January contained primitive forms of carbon that might reveal something about the generation of early life on earth.
| |
| October 10, 2000 | - Fungus was devouring Russia's Mir space station.
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| September 26, 2000 | -
South Africa's
Communist Party affirmed that AIDS is caused by the HIV virus; President Thabo Mbeki believes otherwise, and his ministry of health recently issued a leaflet claiming that AIDS was the result of a conspiracy between the Illuminati and space aliens.
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| September 19, 2000 | - Astronauts from the space shuttle Atlantis installed a treadmill on the international space station.
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| September 5, 2000 | - Albert Einstein's theory that a massive spinning object will twist space-time around it received support from X-rays emanating from three neutron stars detected by the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer, a NASA
satellite.
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| August 29, 2000 | - Data from the Galileo spacecraft yielded evidence that Europa, Jupiter's second moon, may have salty liquid oceans beneath its icy shell, increasing the likelihood of finding life there.
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| August 8, 2000 | - Microbes survived a brief experimental space flight.
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| August 1, 2000 | - A Russian spacecraft docked with the International Space Station above Kazakhstan.
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| August 1, 2000 | - Geologists revealed that a rock that crashed through the windshield of a parked car in Clayton, Wis., in 1996 was a 4.56 billion-year-old meteorite that fell directly from outer space.
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| August 1, 2000 | -
NASA announced that it would send a new unmanned rover to Mars in 2003; recent evidence suggests that water once was present on the planet's surface.
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