Thinking 'Bots May Probe Planets for Us

NASA launches lander with years-long mission to red planet

(NEWSER) - An unmanned rocket carrying a robotic excavation machine is on its way to Mars following a successful launch from Cape Canaveral this morning. The AP reports that the Phoenix Mars Lander should arrive on Mars in May, 2008, when it will collect and analyze soil and ice in search of organic compounds on the red planet. More»

Failed star has temperature a tenth of the sun's

(NEWSER) - Scientists are over the moon with the discovery of a cold brown dwarf in the Cetus constellation. The star-like body, spotted by a British team using the UKIRT telescope in Hawaii, is the coldest of its kind ever seen, the BBC reports, tipping thermometers at just 800 degrees F, a tenth the temperature of the sun. More»

(NEWSER) - In a cost-cutting move, NASA is shutting down its futuristic think tank, source of way-ahead-of-the-curve ideas, many of them worthy of a Star Trek script. Closing the Institute for Advanced Concepts will save $4 million out of NASA’s $16 billion dollar budget. But former NASA scientist Keith Cowing describes the decision as “just plan stupid.. explorers without the right tools die.” More»

And it has a lot of planets

(NEWSER) - What does the Milky Way look like, from outside the Milky Way? It seems like an impossible question to answer, but astronomers found a way—and discovered in the process that the Milky Way is, as one might have guessed, white. "If you looked at new spring snow, which has a fine grain size, about an hour after dawn or an hour before sunset, you'd see the same spectrum of light that an alien astronomer in another galaxy would see looking at the Milky Way," one astronomer explains to the BBC . More»

Paul Allen project might be ready for tests in 2016

(NEWSER) - The world's biggest plane, with wings longer than a football field, is being built to launch astronauts and cargo into outer space. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and aerospace innovator Burt Rutan have teamed up to create the gargantuan aircraft, which will work by hauling a rocket high into the air and then blasting it into space, thus bypassing the need for a launch pad and saving on fuel, reports AP . They unveiled their plans yesterday. More»