A step towards making 3D printing affordable has been made at Michigan Technological University, which presented an open-source 3D metal printer for only $1,500. Detailed plans and software are all open-source and freely available, too. So far affordable 3D printing has been more about using polymers. Yet we all know that the ‘real thing’ must be made of metal. But the price of 3D metal printers... 

NASA scientists have been secretly at work for a year on a walking, humanoid-like robot meant to evoke awe in anyone who comes across it and it looks like they’ve accomplished their mission. Researchers at NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, Texas have released video footage of what they’re entering in a Pentagon-sponsored robotics contest later this month, and the evidence is... 

NASA is bravely venturing into new scientific territory with a plan to start growing plants on the moon no later than 2015. The experiment is designed to yield important knowledge about life’s long-term chances in space – including for us. The initiative comes courtesy of the Lunar Plant Growth Habitat team – a small group of scientists, students, volunteers and contractors – who plan to install... 

Nov. 17, 2013, At Cape Canaveral Air Force Station’s Space Launch Complex 41 a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket stands ready to boost the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, or MAVEN, spacecraft on a 10-month journey to the Red Planet. NASA successfully launched its Maven orbiter into space from Cape Canaveral, Florida on Monday as part of the agency’s latest operation aimed at exploring... 

Aircraft experts and military aficionados have cause to rejoice now that Lockheed Martin has debuted the SR-72 unmanned spy plane, the long-awaited successor to the SR-71 Blackbird and potentially the first hypersonic craft to enter service. Plans for the SR-72 drone were first unveiled Friday in an Aviation Week article which revealed that Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works advanced development program... 

This 23 March, 2004 NASA Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) image shows a crater in Utopia Planitia on Mars. There used to be an ocean on Mars about three billion years ago and its remains can still be observed, Russian scientists said. “Our studies have shown that an ocean existed in the Utopia Planitia region on the Red Planet,” Mikhail Ivanov from Space Research Institute of... 

A potentially catastrophic asteroid has been discovered by astronomers, who say there’s a slim chance that the 410-meter-wide minor planet will crash into Earth in 2032, creating a blast 50 times greater than the biggest nuclear bomb. The asteroid, described as 2013 TV135, was found in the Camelopardalis (Giraffe) constellation by the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory in southern Ukraine, the Minor... 

The image was captured from the International Space Station by Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano. His colleague Mike Hopkins tweeted: ‘Saw something launch into space today. Not sure what it was but the cloud it left behind was pretty amazing’ On October 11th, ESA/Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano posted some bizarre photos via his Twitter account from the International Space Station. A mystery... 

With NASA staff sent home and the Curiosity rover dozing off on Mars, former astronaut Tom Jones tells RT how the US government shutdown will affect the space agency’s projects and deadlines. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s 55th birthday celebrations on October 1 were marred as it [NASA] sustained one of the biggest blows of all the governmental agencies due to the stalemate... 

The rover Curiosity has discovered water in fine-grained soil on the surface of Mars, NASA confirmed Thursday in a series of papers published in the journal Science. Each cubic foot of Martian soil contains about two pints of liquid water, though the molecules are bound to other minerals in the soil. Curiosity first landed on Mars in August 2012 on Gale Crater, near the equator of the planet. Its... 

Asteroid Cruithne with serial number 3753 has attracted a lot of attention of scientists recently. The asteroid moves around the sun in orbit similar to that of the Earth, and is located at a more or less same distance from the Earth throughout the year, which makes it a so-called quasi-satellite of our planet. What does it mean for us? Cruithne’s diameter is five kilometers, and its weight... 

Glowing a dark magenta, the newly discovered exoplanet GJ 504b weighs in with about four times Jupiter’s mass, making it the lowest-mass planet ever directly imaged around a star like the sun. Meet GJ 504b, a cute-looking Jupiter-sized planet, currently the lowest-mass celestial body outside of solar system, which astronomers managed to image directly. Glowing a dark magenta, the newly discovered... 

NASA image from 21 March, 2000 shows a “direct” picture of the first four years of Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory spacecraft’s Energetic Gamma-Ray Experiment Telescope(EGRET) data. A desolate site in Siberia will soon become the forefront of international research into the secrets of the Universe, after the world’s biggest gamma ray detection array scientists are creating there comes... 

Entering the unknown: This artist’s impression shows how plasma flows around NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft as it gets close to entering interstellar space Nasa’s Voyager 1 is on the verge of becoming the first human-made object to enter interstellar space, scientists say. First launched in 1977, the unmanned spacecraft has been in uncharted territory since last year. Scientists had... 

The 1998 QE2 asteroid has the physical mass to potentially deliver life on Earth a knockout punch, being 2.7km in length. It is to buzz our planet on May 31, aweing the stargazing community. Officially known as Asteroid 1998 QE2, the ‘minor planet’, as astronomers refer to these space objects, is about nine times the length of its name-sharing ocean liner, Queen Elizabeth 2. The incoming space...