US astronomers said Thursday they have discovered the first planet that is orbiting two Suns, much like the fictional home of Luke Skywalker featured in Star Wars. Skywalker's native planet of Tatooine was hot and desert-like, but this planet, called Kepler-16b, is a freezing cold world about the size of Saturn, orbiting two parent Suns in a near perfect circle about 200 light years away. The planet was glimpsed with the US space agency's Kepler …

The US space agency plans to launch two unmanned spacecraft Thursday that will chase each other around the Moon as they use gravity measurements to draw an unprecedented map of its inner workings. Known as the GRAIL mission, or Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory, the satellites will launch together on a single Delta II rocket as early as 8:37 am Thursday (1237 GMT), when the launch window opens. Researchers hope GRAIL will answer some of …

A piece of the space shuttle Columbia, which broke apart and burned on re-entry more than eight years ago, has been found in a lake, NASA officials said. Wreckage from shuttle Columbia was uncovered in East Texas this week, the result of a prolonged drought lowering water levels in a lake. The spherical tank, which is about four feet in diameter, is stuck in the mud alongside Lake Nacogdoches. More than 40 tons of wreckage rained down on a long …

CAPE CANAVERAL: A pair of spacecraft rocketed toward the moon Saturday on the first mission dedicated to measuring lunar gravity and determining what's inside Earth's orbiting companion — all the way down to the core. "I could hardly be happier," said the lead scientist, Maria Zuber. After two days of delays and almost another, "I was trying to be as calm as I could be." NASA launched the near identical probes named Grail-A and Grail-B aboard a …

A journey that began four decades before Columbus sailed for the New World finally ended when the Kepler space telescope snared a few errant photons as they shot past Earth’s orbit en route to infinity. The light had sped through space for 560 years, traveling more than three quadrillion miles from a star much like our sun. Captured by Kepler’s digital sensors, transformed into bytes of data, and downloaded to computers at NASA’s Ames Research Center …

On March 23 scientists at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center spent the day destroying perfectly good metal in the name of rocket science. The engineers watched as a giant machine crushed a 20-foot-tall 
hollow metal can with nearly a million pounds of force over the course of about five hours. The point? To simulate the extreme forces that can bend and compress the surface of a rocket as it plows through the atmosphere into space. The “can crusher” …

NASA will somehow have to accomplish its most ambitious mission – landing on an asteriod within 15 years, after a presidential directive. The challenges are manifold, but NASA nerds are delirious at tackling the nitty gritty of such an inconceivably challenging project – though Hollywood has already done it in “Armageddon” 13 years ago. An asteroid is a gigantic rock orbiting the sun, like Earth. One of them, just 16 km across, devastated the earth …

Can we call it as a day of Vijay as we have come across many updates of the actor regarding his future and ongoing projects. So, you’re guess is right we are again back with a latest news about Vijay’s Velayudham. It is well known that Velayudham audio is releasing in July and the tentative date is July 5th, 2011. It looks like chances are bright for the audio to hit the stores on July 5th as music composer Vijay Antony has handed over the master …

Human beings will meet creatures from outer space within the next 20 years, a top Russian scientist has said. “The genesis of life is as inevitable as the formation of atoms. Life exists on other planets and we will find it within 20 years,” Andrei Finkelstein, director of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Applied Astronomy Institute, was quoted as saying by the Telegraph. Interfax news agency said the scientist was speaking at an international …

India’s mega geostationary satellite GSAT-8 was spinning in an elliptical geo-synchronous transfer orbit early Saturday after an Ariane-V rocket successfully lifted it off the Kourou spaceport in French Guiana, said a top official of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).”The Rs.260-crore advanced communication satellite was injected into the transfer orbit 31 minutes after a textbook launch at 0208 IST and it started beaming signals to our …