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European Space Agency

French astronaut Thomas Pesquet on his first spacewalk on Jan. 13.

French and US astronauts spacewalk for space station repairs

Science

French astronaut Thomas Pesquet and US astronaut Shane Kimbrough switched on their spacesuits’ internal battery power, and walked into space to help install three new, refrigerator-sized lithium-ion batteries to upgrade the power system at the International Space Station.

Gaia - Milky Way

Mapping the Milky Way as never before

Science
An artist's impression of ESA's Rosetta approaching comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The comet image was taken on August 2, 2014, by the spacecraft's navigation camera at a distance of about 500 km. The spacecraft and comet are not to scale.

Scientists prepare for a historic landing on a ‘seething and sputtering and spitting’ comet

Science

A new report confirms that Antarctica is melting–still slowly, but twice as fast as four years ago

Environment
The European Space Agency’s Earth Explorer CryoSat makes precise measurements of changes in the thickness of marine ice floating in the polar oceans, as well as variations in the thickness of the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica.

On a long downward slide, scientists say 2013 was an up year for Arctic Ice

Environment

Gaia’s on a mission to create a 3-D map of the Milky Way’s stars

Environment

The European Space Agency’s Gaia mission is headed into space. The $1 billion space observatory blasted off from French Guiana Thursday morning on a mission to create a very detailed, 3-D map of the Milky Way. No special glasses required.

The World

Hubble Telescope Captures Extreme Deep View of Universe

Arts, Culture & Media

The Hubble Space Telescope has produced one of its most extraordinary views of the Universe to date – an extreme deep shot that captures galaxies as they were just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.

The World

Star Search

Astronomers are counting on APEX, one of the highest telescopes in the world, to answer one of astronomy’s greatest mysteries: how a star is born.

The World

High Security Lab Plans Draw Community Protests in Boston

Part 1: Anthrax, Ebola and other pathogens could be steps away from residents in the environmental justice community of Roxbury, Massachusetts; that’s if the plan for a new, high-security biolab is approved for Boston University’s Medical Center. Officials there say the lab would be airtight, and that researchers wearing moon suits would essentially be working […]

Tyson on Titan

When the Huygens space probe landed on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, on January 14th the world watched in awe. Living on Earth invited Neil deGrasse Tyson, the director of New York’s Hayden Planetarium, to talk about the mission. Tyson tells guest host Bruce Gellerman about Titan’s unusual features, what we didn’t learn from Huygen’s data, […]