Kids News

The total solar eclipse on August 21, 2017, is the first of its kind to go coast-to-coast across the continental United States in nearly a century. While the partial eclipse will start earlier and end later, the total eclipse will travel from Oregon to South Carolina in a speedy 93 minutes. Its narrow, 70-mile-wide, path of totality will begin at Lincoln Beach, OR at 10:15 a.m PDT (1:15 p.m. EDT) and continue through Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia and North Carolina, before ending in Charleston, SC at 11:48 a.m. PDT (2:48 p.m. EDT)....

Space travel is expensive, especially since every launch requires a new rocket. The biggest and most costly part is the booster that powers the spacecraft beyond the Earth’s orbit. Once the job, which takes a few minutes, is completed, it separates from the rest of the rocket and drops back into the ocean while the second stage engine takes over and delivers the payload to its destination....

In August 2013, billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk released a 57-page white paper concept for Hyperloop — a supersonic mass transit system between high-traffic cities that lie within short distances. The founder of Tesla Motors and SpaceX envisioned it to be a frictionless system where pods inside low-pressure, vacuum-sealed tubes would transport passengers and cargo at up to 760 miles an hour — approximately the speed of sound. Powered by solar energy, it would be strong enough to withstand extreme weather and earthquakes....

On November 19, after two days aboard a Soyuz MS-03 spacecraft, NASA’s Peggy Whitson, along with Russian cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy and rookie ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet, docked at the International Space Station (ISS). In doing so, America’s most experienced female astronaut became the oldest woman in space, breaking the former record set by Barbara Morgan who reached the ISS at age 55....

The Hubble Space Telescope that has been orbiting the Earth since 1990, has and continues to reveal the secrets of planets, stars, and galaxies that lie trillions of miles away. In 2018, it will finally be retired and replaced by the larger, and more powerful, James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The announcement, made by NASA on November 2, culminates a 20-year quest to build a state of the art telescope that cost $8.7 billion and required the construction of new assembly and testing facilities...

NASA scientists can build rockets, send men to the moon, and may soon even help establish a colony on Mars. But can they carve pumpkins? That was the challenge posed to the brilliant engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, CA six years ago, during Halloween. The friendly competition has since become an annual tradition with teams trying to outdo each other with increasingly hi-tech carvings....

On August 27, NASA’s Juno mission completed the first orbital flyby of Jupiter. Traveling at a speed of 130,000 mph, the spacecraft passed about 2,600 miles above the gas giant’s swirling clouds. Though the space probe will be conducting 35 additional flybys before the mission ends on February 2018, this was its closest approach and hence, the most important for data collection. Juno did not disappoint....

In 1979, the Voyager 1 spacecraft discovered that Alaska, Canada, Siberia, and Antarctica were not the only places with spectacular auroras or “polar lights” — Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system, has them as well. While the lights have been studied intensely since, a recent month-long observation of Jupiter’s north pole by the Hubble Space Telescope has resulted in some beautiful, never before seen images of the planet’s northern lights....

On May 26, NASA astronaut Jeff Williams spent seven hours inflating the first expandable room at the International Space Station. Called Bigelow Expandable Activity Module, or BEAM, the balloon-like structure that measures 10-feet by 13-feet, (about the size of an average bedroom) when fully inflated, is the first prototype of what NASA experts hope will be the space habitat of the future. The compressed module arrived at the ISS aboard the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft on April 8 and was put in place outside the Tranquility module by ISS’s robotic arm, Canadarm2....