These are the ‘pillownauts,’ and they just got out of bed for the first time in 21 days. The paid volunteers for the European Space Agency laid with their feet up in a medical facility while scientists poked and prodded them to try to understand the effects of spaceflight on astronauts’ bodies.

One of the subjects who took part in this investigation said: “The first days of each session were the worst. The body needs to adapt and I had migraines and backaches."

The rather impressive flight deck of NASA's Space Shuttle Endeavour, a now-retired orbiter.

Not much of a believer in dwarf planets, but here's a cool schematic of some.


In 2006 the organization responsible for classifying celestial bodies, the International Astronomical Union, decided that a new class of objects was needed. The solar system's erratic ninth planet, Pluto, was assigned to the new “dwarf planet” category along with four other bodies, all tinier than Earth’s moon. Some astronomers expect there may be as many as 50 dwarf planets in the solar system.

Eris, the largest dwarf planet, is only slightly bigger than Pluto, at 1,445 miles in diameter (2,326 km). Discovered in 2003, Eris orbits at an average distance of 68 AU (that is, 68 times the Earth’s distance from the sun) and takes 561.4 Earth years to circle the sun. E ...

This is not an illusion or some kind of sci-fi illustration. It's an actual laser beam, being shot at the eclipsed Moon on the 15 April 2014. The laser's target is the Apollo 15 retroreflector, which was left on the Moon by astronauts in 1971.

This is a full-disk image of Mars, showing nearly an entire hemisphere of the Red Planet. It was captured this week by India's Mars Orbiter Mission and shows a storm brewing in the north (around the 11 o'clock position).

The vortex is a spherical field of force, or a magnetic disturbance. The vortex is 165 feet in diameter and sits half way above ground and half below. The disturbance, or vortex causes unexplainable changes in perception, causing naturally occurring visual and perceptual phenomena that has been caught on film many times. Within the spherical distortion, people stand at an angle. The disturbance alters your relative gravity, causing you to stand at an angle of varying degrees. It is not possible for someone to stand vertical inside the vortex. It will also make someone who is walking away, seem taller, or shorter depending on where you stand. Balls roll uphill, brooms stand straight up and down on their own, and chairs appear to be held up b ...

Europa, a moon of Jupiter, is a prime candidate for life in our solar system beyond Earth. It contains water and is also the only known solar system body to have plate tectonics.

According to scientists at The Keck Institute for Space Studies in California, NASA is seriously considering capturing an asteroid to put in a high orbit around the moon. If the idea is implemented, we could be looking at a manned mission to "capture" an asteroid in the 2020s. This idea is thought to tie in with the Obama administration's enthusiasm for sending a manned mission to a near-Earth asteroid. If NASA were able to capture an object and lock it into an orbit around the moon, it could be safely used as a practise mission without the need for astronauts to move beyond the range of a rescue mission. ...