The US space agency plans to launch two unmanned spacecraft Thursday that will chase each other around the Moon as they use gravity measurements to draw an unprecedented map of its inner workings.Known as the GRAIL mission, or Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory, the…

Astronomers claim that a planet orbiting a small fast spinning star, called a pulsar, is likely made of diamond. Pulsars are small spinning stars about 20 km in diameter – the size of a small city – that emits a beam of radio waves. As…

CAPE CANAVERAL: A pair of spacecraft rocketed toward the moon Saturday on the first mission dedicated to measuring lunar gravity and determining what's inside Earth's orbiting companion — all the way down to the core."I could hardly be happier," said the lead scientist, Maria…

A journey that began four decades before Columbus sailed for the New World finally ended when the Kepler space telescope snared a few errant photons as they shot past Earth’s orbit en route to infinity. The light had sped through space for 560 years, traveling…

NEW YORK: Apple plans to begin trial production of a next generation iPad in October with an eye to an early 2012 launch, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday.The newspaper, citing "people familiar with the situation," said Apple is working with component suppliers and…

China launched its ninth navigation satellite on Wednesday, the official Xinhua news agency reported, citing sources at the launch centre.A rocket carrying the "Beidou", or Compass, navigation satellite orbiter blasted off from the Xichang Satellite Launching Centre in southwestern Sichuan Province at 5:44 am…

On March 23 scientists at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center spent the day destroying perfectly good metal in the name of rocket science. The engineers watched as a giant machine crushed a 20-foot-tall 
hollow metal can with nearly a million pounds of force over the…

IT MAY be grey but it is not as old as you might imagine. A rock thought to date from the moon's formation points to the satellite being about 200 million years younger than previously calculated, suggesting its history may need to be rewritten.The…

Female animals flock to the ridiculous: the gangly antlered moose, the blue-bottomed baboon, and the garish peacock. But a new study suggests that túngara frog (Physalaemus pustulosus) females from Latin America keep that machismo posturing from turning too bizarre. Males of this species serenade their…

The Canadian rock band Rush knows its astronomy. In a lengthy 1977 song, the musicians proclaimed Cygnus X-1, an x-ray emitting object thousands of light-years away, a black hole where voyagers venture "through the void to be destroyed"—even though physicist Stephen Hawking had bet against…