In this Tuesday, Jan. 7, 2014 image made available by NASA, a giant cloud of solar particles, a coronal mass ejection, explodes off the sun, lower right, captured by the European Space Agency and NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory. (AP Photo/ESA, NASA - SOHO) CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- A privately launched supply ship rocketed toward the International Space Station on Thursday following a series of delays ranging from the cold to the sun. Orbital Sciences Corp. launched its unmanned Antares...

The hand might look like an X-ray from the doctor's office, but it is actually a cloud of material ejected from a star that exploded. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/McGill) Religion and astronomy may not overlap often, but a new NASA X-ray image captures a celestial object that resembles the "Hand of God." The cosmicwas produced when a star exploded and ejected an enormous cloud of material, which NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, glimpsed in high-energy X-rays, shown in blue in the...

Liftoff of Space Shuttle Endeavour Billows of smoke and steam infused with the fiery light from space shuttle Endeavour's launch on the STS-127 mission fill NASA Kennedy Space Center's Launch Pad 39A. Endeavour lifted off on the mission's sixth launch attempt, on July 15, 2009 at 6:03 p.m. EDT. CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- The six space station astronauts finally got their Christmas presents Sunday with the arrival of a privately launched supply ship that took an extra month to soar....

NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity captured an image of the mysterious space rock. (NASA Image) NASA's Mars Opportunity Rover was supposed to be hibernating for the winter, but a strange object that caught scientists' eyes couldn't be ignored. An image posted to Opportunity's website on the Martian surface. It from the scientists studying the object, according to an RT.com report. (MORE: ) A News.com.au article said space fans have speculated about the origins of the rock, saying it could be...

A European probe awoke from a deep sleep Monday to gear up for an unprecedented comet rendezvous and landing this year that will cap a 10-year voyage across the solar system. After two and a half years in hibernation, the European Space Agency's emerged from its slumber while cruising nearly 418 million miles from the sun. The wakeup call, which was due to begin at 5 a.m. EST, took hours as Rosetta switched on heaters to warm itself after its...

NASA astronaut Don Pettit captured stunning star trails using a long-exposure technique while on the International Space Station in 2012. (NASA/Don Pettit) NASA's newest communications satellite blasted into space Thursday night, beefing up the network that links ground controllers to the International Space Station and Earth-orbiting research observatories. The 3.8-ton at 9:33 p.m. EST from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, its Atlas 5 rocket lighting up the night sky with bright-orange flame as it climbed toward space. TDRS-L is...

(Sierra Nevada Corporation) A commercial spaceflight company will launch the first orbital test flight of its private space plane Dream Chaser in 2016, a unmanned debut mission to prove the spaceship is capable of flying astronauts on round-trip flights into space. The , built by Sierra Nevada Corp., is scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral, Fla. on Nov. 1, 2016, atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket, the company announced Thursday (Jan. 23). While the spacecraft — which looks...

Astronomers have discovered an alien planet that wobbles at such a dizzying rate that its seasons must fluctuate wildly. Throughout all of the planet's fast-changing seasons, however, no forecast would be friendly to humans. The warm planet is a gassy super-Neptune that orbits too close to its two parent stars to be in its system's "," the region where temperatures would allow liquid water, and perhaps life as we know it, to exist. The faraway world, which lies 2,300 light-years...

(NASA) Scientists have solved the mystery of the strange "jelly doughnut" rock on Mars. NASA's Opportunity rover spotted an odd Martian rock that looked like a doughnut on Jan. 8. Four days earlier, however, the rock wasn't there at all. So how did the rock appear? Alien rock throwers? A nearby meteorite impact? The truth is much less surprising. Scientists working with the intrepid robot have just confirmed that the rock (called Pinnacle Island) was simply kicked up by one...

Artist's view of a watery asteroid in the white-dwarf system GD 61. (NASA, ESA, M.A. Garlick, University of Warwick, and University of Cambridge) An asteroid the size of three football fields is set to make a close brush of Earth on Monday (Feb. 17), and you can watch the flyby in a live webcast. Near-Earth asteroid2000EM26poses no threat of actually hitting the planet, but the online Slooh Space Camera will track the asteroid as it passes by Earth on Monday....

Scientists have detected water vapor features around the hot Jupiter Tau Bootis b. (Alexandra Lockwood/Caltech) Water vapor has been detected in the atmosphere of one of the first alien planets ever identified by astronomers. Advances in the technique used to scan the atmosphere of this "hot Jupiter" could help scientists determine how many of the billions of planets in theMilky Waycontain water like Earth, researchers said. The exoplanet Tau Boötis b was discovered in 1996, when the search for worlds...

Water fills the empty spacesuit helmet of Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano in an Aug. 27, 2013 test of the faulty spacewalking gear, which forced NASA to abort a July 16 spacewalk for safety reasons. (NASA TV) A potentially deadly spacesuit water leak that nearly drowned an Italian astronaut during a spacewalk last July was one of the scariest close calls in NASA's spacewalk history. In fact, the spacesuit also leaked during an earlier spacewalk, but went undetected at the time,...