On March 18, 1965, the first extravehicular activity – or EVA – in space was conducted by Russian cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov, who spent ten minutes outside his Vokshod 2 spacecraft in Earth orbit. Leonov’s historic spacewalk paved the way for all future EVAs, from Ed White’s first American EVA on June 3 of the same…
Author: Jason Major
Jason is a Rhode Island-based graphic designer, photographer, nature lover, and space exploration fanatic.
Have the Best-Laid Plans of MarsOne Finally Gone Awry?
Just one month after the announcement of the 100 “finalists” selected by MarsOne – a Dutch nonprofit company that’s promising to establish a permanent colony on the Red Planet by 2025 – a scathing exposé has been published online that reveals some of the behind-the-scenes processes that have been going on for applicants, as described by selected finalist Dr….
This is What it Would Look Like to Fight Flying Dragons on Titan
Obviously this is a totally-for-fun sci-fi video, but what a video! Created by Oscar-nominated Irish filmmaker Ruairi Robinson, it shows fleets of very industrial-looking fighter skiffs hunting giant flying eels through the skies of some very cloudy planet… the first thought that came to my mind was Titan! (Although Titan is more hazy than cloudy…
Closing In on Planet Pluto: an Interview with New Horizons PI Alan Stern
After more than nine years of traveling through space the New Horizons spacecraft is now in the home stretch of its journey, with less than 120 days and 143 million kilometers to go before it makes its historic flyby of the Pluto system on July 14. It will be the first time we get a good close-up look…
Ground-Based Radar Reveals the Surface of Venus
These days if you look toward the west after sunset you’ll see a bright star that’s the first to appear in the sky – except it’s not a star at all but our neighboring planet, Venus. Covered in a dense layer of thick clouds, Venus not only reflects a lot of sunlight but also keeps its…
Ganymede’s Aurorae Hint at an Ocean Ten Times Deeper than Earth’s
It’s long been suspected that Jupiter’s giant moon Ganymede may harbor a subsurface ocean of liquid water beneath its icy yet hard-as-rock crust, and now some ingenious observations with the Hubble Space Telescope are making an even more convincing case for it!
An Absolutely Epic Photo of Humans Returning From Space
It almost doesn’t look real but it is: the return of three humans aboard a Soyuz TMA-14M capsule after spending nearly six months aboard the ISS as part of Expedition 41/42, captured on camera by NASA photographer Bill Ingalls during their sunlit descent via parachute. The Soyuz landed in a remote area near the town of…
Suspected Hydrothermal Activity on Enceladus Raises Hopes for Life
Ever since their discovery by the Cassini spacecraft in 2005, the plumes of icy particles that are being fired into space from deep gashes along the southern pole of Saturn’s moon Enceladus have intrigued planetary scientists and astronomers immensely. Here we have a world in our own Solar System, relatively not so far away, where…
Beyond the Edge of Jupiter: Europa Rising
One of the most beautiful images of Jupiter and its ice-covered moon Europa was actually taken by the New Horizons spacecraft destined for Pluto! The view above was captured by New Horizon’s LORRI imager from a distance of 1.4 million miles from Jupiter on Feb. 28, 2007 just after it made its closest pass of…
The Next Chapter of Philae’s Big Adventure is Here!
If you’ve been following the animated adventures of Rosetta and Philae from the European Space Agency you may have been wondering when the next episode of Philae’s big adventure would be coming. Well it’s here, and you can find out (again) what happened to the little lander on November 12, 2014 when it made its…
History Is Made Today As Dawn Arrives At Ceres
It’s official – NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has arrived at the dwarf planet Ceres! Today, March 6 2015, at 7:39 a.m. EST (12:39 UTC) Dawn was captured by Ceres’ gravity at a distance of 38,000 miles (61,155 km). Mission controllers at JPL received a signal from the spacecraft at 8:36 a.m. EST (13:36 UTC) that Dawn was healthy and…
What is a Neutron Star, Anyway?
Neutron stars are strange cosmic beasts. Stellar corpses that are several times the mass of our Sun but only about the width of Manhattan, they can contain a mountain’s worth of star-stuff within the space of a sugar cube, creating all sorts of weird physics that requires funny-sounding names like “quark-gluon plasma” to even try to describe what’s…
Lights in the Dark 