Russ McBee

NASA's Phoenix mission to the polar regions of Mars landed flawlessly this weekend. The mission's goal is to drill beneath the frozen surface and extract samples of ice and soil, which the lander can then subject to a battery of chemical tests. This is one more exciting mission in NASA's spectacular portfolio of robotic planetary exploration. The ...

At last year's TED conference, one of the presenters was Carolyn Porco, the leader of the Imaging Team on the Cassini mission to Saturn. Her presentation focused mainly on a tour of the discoveries regarding two of Saturn's most intriguing moons: Titan and Enceladus. For centuries, Titan had been a mystery, its surface completely shrouded in a ...

Holy crap! I just saw the International Space Station and the Space Shuttle Atlantis fly directly overhead. The shuttle was first, then the space station followed quickly behind. They grew in brightness as they rose above the western horizon, and by the time they skirted past the Big Dipper, they were both as bright as Venus. They moved ...

Richard Branson is undeniably a gadfly, but this is just plain awesome, in the most awesome sense of the word: Virgin Galactic's chief operating officer revealed Friday at the National Space Society's 26th Annual International Space Development Conference that the suborbital spaceliner research and development company is in ...

I haven't blogged much about Spirit and Opportunity, the two little Mars rovers that could, although I'm completely obsessed with them. They were only planned to last three months, yet they're still chugging along after three years. Practically every week, one of them returns yet more evidence that Mars was once covered in water. This week was ...

Partly as a replacement for the Hubble Space Telescope, NASA is currently designing the James Webb Space Telescope. If all goes well, it will launch in 2013. Although I personally think they should keep funding the Hubble as long as it can feasibly continue operating, NASA didn't ask for my opinion, so they plan to let the Hubble burn up ...