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SpaceX Crew Capsule Failure Could Delay Its First Manned Flight A SpaceX capsule designed to ferry NASA astronauts to the International Space Station suffered a failure during an engine test Saturday afternoon that sent a billowing plume of smoke into the air over Cape Canaveral, Florida. No one was injured, and it was not clear what caused the accident or how serious it was. In a statement, the company said the failure occurred as it was conducting "a series of engine tests." The initial tests were "completed successfully, but the final test resulted in an anomaly on the test stand." The failure comes at a critical time for the California-based company founded by Elon Musk . It hopes to fly astronauts to the space station as soon as this year as part of NASA's "commercial crew program." And it comes ahead of tests of the capsule's escape system, which is designed to jettison the spacecraft away from its rocket in the event of an emergency...

This NASA planet hunter is searching for worlds just like Earth The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite is tentatively scheduled to launch on April 16 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and focus on stars nearer than those analysed by NASA’s planet-seeker Kepler. Photo: NASA Just 25 years ago, no one knew for sure whether the stars dotting our night skies had anything circling them that resembled planets, let alone one like  Earth. Then came a  NASA  planet-seeker called Kepler, which starting in 2009 began finding intriguing, tell-tale blips around stars other than our sun. Almost everywhere its cameras looked, a new blip was discovered, signifying a rich abundance of “exoplanets.” Kepler’s prodigious planet-spotting — more than 1,000 of the 3,700 discovered to date — was among the first astronomical endeavours to show that the basic pattern of our solar system appears to be common elsewhere. Now, the successor to  Kepler  is here. This pl...

India on Thursday successfully launched the GSAT-6A satellite that would provide mobile  communication facilities, using its heavy rocket  Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle  (GSLV-F08), in a copybook style. The GSLV-MkII rocket slung the satellite in a geosynchronous transfer orbit (GTO) from where it would be taken up to its final geostationary orbit by three orbit raising manoeuvres. ISRO's scientists at the mission control centre were visibly happy, slapping each others' backs  and hugging each other once the rocket ejected the satellite into the intended orbit. Precisely at 4.56pm, the GSLV rocket ascended into the sky from the second launch pad here at Satish Dhawan Space Centre and the 49.1-metre tall rocket, weighing 415.6 tonnes,  slung the two-tonne satellite into the intended orbit 17.46 minutes into its flight. The purpose of the satellite is to provide mobile communication applications in S-band in five  spot beams an...

The unusual galaxy’s stars are speeding around with no apparent influence from dark matter, according to a study. It’s a double cosmic conundrum: Lots of stuff that was already invisible has gone missing. Astronomers have found a distant galaxy where there is no dark matter. Dark matter is called “dark” because it can’t be seen. It is the mysterious and invisible skeleton of the universe that scientists figure makes up about 27 per cent of the cosmos. Scientists only know dark matter exists because they can observe how it pushes and pulls things they can see, like stars. It’s supposed to be everywhere. But Yale University astronomer Pieter van Dokkum and colleagues spied a vast, old galaxy with relatively few stars where what you see truly is what you get. The galaxy’s stars are speeding around with no apparent influence from dark matter, according to a study published in Wednesday’s journal Nature. Instead of shaking the very foundations of physics, scientists say thi...