NASA News

L. Kaltenegger: We can learn the future of Earth through the coming discoveries of small planets in the habitable zone.

From @NASAKepler on Twitter: ( 6:31 pm, Thu 18 Apr 2013)

• World
• NASA

NASA scientists said the Kepler-62e and Kepler-62f planets were the first potentially habitable worlds discovered that are less than twice the size of Earth:

Lisa Kaltenegger: We have for the first time potentially habitable planets less than twice the size of the Earth. http://t.co/iqSD5Kh2oQ

From @NASA on Twitter: ( 6:27 pm, Thu 18 Apr 2013)

Bill Borucki: Kelper-62-e & 62-f are considered rocky and may be habitable. We don't know yet! http://t.co/iqSD5Kh2oQ

From @NASA on Twitter: ( 6:15 pm, Thu 18 Apr 2013)

• World
• NASA

Three new planets that could host life have been discovered, NASA scientists said today.

The "super Earth-sized" worlds were found in the habitable zone outside the solar system by NASA's Kepler satellite.

Space scientist Bill Borucki said two of the planets, named Kepler-62e and Kepler-62f, were "the best candiates found to date for habitable planets."

• World
• NASA

Over the coming months, AMS will be able to tell us conclusively whether these positrons are a signal for dark matter, or whether they have some other origin.

When you take a new precision instrument into a new regime, you tend to see many new results, and we hope this will be the first of many AMS is the first experiment to measure to 1% accuracy in space.

It is this level of precision that will allow us to tell whether our current positron observation has a dark matter or a pulsar origin.

• Technology
• Space
• International Space Station

Since the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) was installed in May last year it has been gathering data from millions of light years beyond our galaxy, the Milky Way.

Until now, scientists have only been able to theorise the existence of dark matter, which makes up around 26% of the universe.

Its ghostly presence around galaxies exerts a gravitational effect that can be measured and observed as rings, but what it is made of remains to be proven.

The findings announced by Nasa reveal a positron spike "consistent" with the kind of interaction expected by one theory relating to dark matter.

But the scientists say the evidence is not yet "sufficiently conclusive" to rule out other explanations

• Technology
• Space
• International Space Station

Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environmental Office said the widely-reported flash in the sky was probably "a single meteor event." He told the Associated Press:

[It] looks to be a fireball that moved roughly toward the South East, going on visual reports.

Judging from the brightness, we're dealing with something as bright as the full moon.

The thing is probably a yard across. We basically have [had] a boulder enter the atmosphere over the North East.

The reports are consistent with a meteor that hit in Russia's Ural Mountains last month, only smaller.

• World
• NASA
• Weather

A Russian Soyuz capsule made a perfect 'bull's eye' landing in the steppes of Kazakhstan today, delivering a Russian-American trio from the International Space Station.

NASA's Kevin Ford and Russian cosmonauts Oleg Novitskiy and Evgeny Tarelkin spent 144 days in space on a journey of almost 61 million miles.

• And Finally
• NASA
• Space

A video has captured the rare moment a comet appeared in the sky close to both Earth and Mercury.

The image was caught by a NASA spacecraft that usually looks out for solar flares. The American Space agency says the video "shows the comet and its fluttering tail as it moves through space." The Earth appears on the right of the video, while Mercury is visible on the left.

• And Finally
• Space
• NASA