A joint effort between NASA and General Motors to improve robotic technology and capabilities for future space exploration platforms has led to Robonaut 2, NASA’s first dexterous humanoid robot. Robonaut 2 was built to work on space stations, assisting astronauts with dangerous or repetitive jobs. Robonaut 2, NASA’s first dexterous humanoid robot, has successfully hitched [...]

The NASA Dawn mission is receiving 40 extra days to explore Vesta and scientists plan to make the most out of it. They hope to learn more about this mysterious asteroid while extending the observations at Dawn’s current low-altitude mapping orbit and building the best possible maps of the elemental composition of Vesta’s surface. PASADENA, [...]

NASA wants to plan a space outpost parked near the Lagrange point, where the Earth’s and moon’s gravitation fields nearly cancel each other out, making it a lot easier to stage manned space missions into space. The Lagrange points, or libration points or L-points, would allow the outpost to remain in an almost fixed position. [...]

The solar-powered Juno spacecraft that was launched in 2011 to improve our understanding of Jupiter’s formation and evolution just completed the mission’s first trajectory correction maneuver. NASA scientists confirmed that the burn went very smoothly and is the first of several planned rocket firings that will keep Juno on course to rendezvous with Jupiter in [...]

Gorillas use human-life facial expressions to communicate with each other, however the Western Lowland gorilla equivalent of a grin means something completely different, as psychologists from the University of Portsmouth recently discovered. Psychologists from the University of Portsmouth have published a paper suggesting gorillas use human-like facial expressions to communicate moods with one another. Not [...]

NASAA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, is one step closer to its March launch. The NuSTAR was shipped to the Vandenberg Air Force Base where it will be mated to its Pegasus launch vehicle. Scientists believe NuSTAR will enable years of astronomical discovery from its advanced telescope consisting of two sets of 133 concentric [...]

Brigham Young University geologist Jani Radebaugh, alongside researchers from NASA and the Naval Research Laboratory, has put forth a plan that would send a done to Titan. Their plan calls for the drone to operate on a nuclear battery transferring the power between a simple propeller and radio during its one year research flight. In [...]

NASA’s Opportunity exploration rover continues to send images and explore new regions on the Mars. Now in its eighth year on the planet, Opportunity has reached “Greeley Haven” and has traveled a total 21.4 miles during its time on Mars. Scientists hope that by staying on the outer ridge at “Greeley Haven,” Martian winds can [...]

NASA’s RXTE has made many important scientific observations over its 16 year history and on January 4th, 2012 it sent its last observation to the ground and was decommissioned on January 5th. Astronomers will hold a special session commemorating the accomplishments of the RXTE at the 219th meeting of the AAS and a press conference [...]

As testing continues on the next deep space exploration vehicle, Orion received its final drop test in what was a series of worst case landing scenarios into NASA Langley Research Center’s Hydro Impact Basin. After six months of testing, an 18,000 pound (8,165 kg) Orion mockup took its final splash into NASA Langley Research Center’s [...]

116 years ago, H.G. Wells introduced us to “The Time Machine” and it seems like time travel has been a subject of debate since then. The world of fiction bombards us with time travel on a regular basis. Marty McFly almost erased himself when he accidentally kept his parents from meeting in “Back to the [...]

This may not look like the future of robots that we were promised from movies like Star Wars and Star Trek, but according to scientists at Harvard University and other leading researchers in the robotics field, flexible robots are the future. They offer the ability to adapt to situations and go places that a standard [...]