32 New Exoplanets Found

Yesterday, at an international ESO/CAUP exoplanet conference in Porto, the team who built the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher, better known as HARPS, the spectrograph for ESO's 3.6-metre telescope, reports on the incredible discovery of some 32 new exoplanets. This finding increases the number of known low-mass planets by 30%. Over the past five years HARPS has spotted more than 75 of the roughly 400 or so exoplanets now known.

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LCROSS Impacts the Moon

NASA's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS spacecraft and its Centaur booster rocket impacted the crater Cabeus near the Moon's South Pole on October 9th. The double-impact, designed to excavate water frozen in the crater's shadowy depths, searched for water ice on the moon.

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NASA Updates Shuttle Atlantis Target Launch Date, Crew Rehearsal

NASA is targeting November 16th for the launch of space shuttle Atlantis' STS-129 mission from the agency's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

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NASA Space Telescope Discovers Largest Ring around Saturn

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has discovered an enormous ring around Saturn -- by far the largest of the giant planet's many rings.

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Ares I-X Moved to Launch Pad

The Ares I-X test rocket is on Launch Pad 39B at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The 4.2-mile journey out of Kennedy's Vehicle Assembly Building traveling less than 1 mph to the launch pad took approximately seven hours.

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Mission Patch Contest Announced

Space Explorers’ annual Mission Patch Contest is underway. With every space flight, a mission patch is created to represent the tasks at hand. These patches include information on the mission’s purpose and goals. Here is your chance to have your students design your very own mission patch. All entries must be postmarked by Friday, December 11, 2009!

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